Sabah’s identity versus Carrick’s model: breaking down the defeat at Old Trafford

Azerbaijan’s champions made their Champions League debut with a 4-0 defeat to Manchester United. The hosts’ goals came from Matheus Cunha in the 27th minute, Bruno Fernandes in the 42nd, Benjamin Sesko in the 45th and Lisandro Martinez in the 68th.

By rejecting a deep defensive block, Valdas Dambrauskas’s side stayed true to its style, but its high press ran into an opponent that Michael Carrick had spent eight months rebuilding precisely to play through pressure.

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In 2002, Valdas Dambrauskas began his coaching career at Manchester United Soccer Schools, a youth programme bearing the club’s name and crest, while working several other jobs to make ends meet. On 10 September 2026, he led Sabah, a club founded in 2017, out at Old Trafford.

In their nine years of existence, the Baku side have won their first league title and the Azerbaijan Cup, come through four qualifying rounds and become the second club from the country, after Qarabag, to reach the main stage of the Champions League. The match also found its way into the record books: Manchester United had never before faced an Azerbaijani club, and Sabah’s starting line-up, according to Opta, was the first by a debutant in the competition’s history to feature players of eleven nationalities.

The United that Sabah faced

As recently as January, Sabah’s opponents looked very different. After Ruben Amorim’s dismissal, United were seventh, and on 13 January Michael Carrick was appointed interim head coach. Under him, the team won 11 of 16 matches, beat Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea, finished third and returned to the Champions League. In May, Carrick was given a permanent contract until 2028.

The changes were above all structural. Amorim had held on to a system with three centre-backs and wing-backs; Carrick moved to a flexible 4-2-3-1 that shifts into a 3-2-5 in attack and a 4-4-2 in defence. Players returned to their natural positions, and they make no secret of it. In an interview with The Guardian, Harry Maguire said Amorim’s ideas were good but had not worked at United, and that he feels more comfortable in a back four.

The most important change concerns build-up play, the very phase Sabah’s press was aimed at.

Under Amorim, goalkeeper Senne Lammens was encouraged to go long. Carrick restored short goal kicks: the team sets up in a 4-2-4, with Lammens positioned between the two centre-backs. As BBC Sport tactics writer Umir Irfan described in his pre-season analysis, the model rests on “trios”, groups of three players who escape pressure through unscripted combinations, and on third-man runs.

For example, a vertical pass into Bruno Fernandes dropping deep acts as the trigger for Youri Tielemans to run beyond his marker.

Out of possession, the same shape keeps four attackers high and narrow, so that when United win the ball back they are immediately level in numbers near the opposition goal. The model’s vulnerability showed in a pre-season match against AC Milan: the Italians dropped their wing-backs deep in a 5-2-3, stretched the pitch, and United’s press could not keep up with the ball. United have started the season unevenly, taking four points from three Premier League games.

Why the pressure did not work

For the first half-hour, Sabah did what their coach had promised on the eve of the game, when he said the team would not come out to surrender or simply defend. The visitors pressed high, at times right on the edge of United’s penalty area, the hosts struggled to build attacks, and groans could be heard from the stands. When the pressure was coordinated, it paid off: in the 36th minute the visitors won the ball in United’s half, Kaheem Parris crossed, and Joy-Lance Mickels headed into the side-netting. According to Opta, it was the only real scare United faced.

But every high regain required the defenders to push up behind the midfield, and every turnover left space behind the visitors, the kind of space in which Carrick’s team is at its best.

Three of the four goals came from precisely this.

The first began with Parris losing the ball in midfield: Fernandes immediately played it left to Patrick Dorgu, who crossed for Matheus Cunha to finish. It was a textbook attack after a turnover, the very reason United keep four players high.

The second goal came from the same Fernandes-Tielemans connection that the BBC had cited in the summer as a template for the new model: Tielemans received the ball in the box and laid it back to Fernandes, who had found space among the defenders.

The third exposed the gap between the lines in its purest form. Sabah’s midfield went to press, the defence moved up towards the centre of the pitch but out of sync, and an empty corridor opened between the lines. With a single vertical pass through the middle, Bryan Mbeumo took the entire back line out of the game, and Benjamin Sesko ran through one-on-one and rounded the goalkeeper. No use of the flanks, not a single unnecessary touch.

Herein lies the central paradox of the evening. Judging by pre-season, Carrick’s model struggles most against opponents who sit deep and leave no space in behind. Sabah chose the opposite path and, in doing so, offered United exactly the kind of game the team has been rebuilt to play. This is not an argument for parking the bus: a deep block is not part of the playing identity of Dambrauskas’s team, and rejecting it was a conscious decision.

But it does explain why courage came at such a price.

The quality of the players also played its part. Since joining United in 2020, Bruno Fernandes has scored more goals, 23, and provided more assists, 21, in UEFA competitions than any other midfielder. The three first-half goals were scored by three different players from assists by three others, and, according to Opta, this was only the second time it had happened for United in the Champions League, the first being in 2003.

Fernandes received the highest FotMob rating, 8.7, with Dorgu on 8.4 and Mbeumo, Cunha and Lisandro Martinez on 8.2 each. Pressing pays off when opponents make mistakes under pressure, and players of this calibre rarely do.

Sabah’s weak points

Dambrauskas himself identified the problem more precisely than any outside observer. Speaking to reporters, he said he had not sensed fear in his team, but “we didn’t have enough courage, especially from the back line to move up”.

At the press conference, the coach elaborated: at times the distance between attack and defence was too great, and after losing the ball the players could not get back in time. Centre-back Steve Solvet missed the match through injury, with Aden McCarthy starting in his place.

The second weak point is the first pass. Dambrauskas’s model relies on playing out from the back with short and medium passes, which makes the goalkeeper the first playmaker.

As early as the qualifying rounds, the Kazakh press noted that Stas Pokatilov performs poorly in this phase of build-up, with both his feet and his hands, although he rarely has serious problems as a shot-stopper. The match in Manchester confirmed this: five saves, but a passing accuracy of 74% against a team average of 86%, and a Flashscore rating of 5.6 against a Sabah average of 6.2.

The fourth goal came from confusion after a quickly taken free-kick: for a few moments the ball bounced between the goalkeeper and a centre-back before Martinez turned it into the net. After the second leg against Hapoel Beer-Sheva, in which Sabah conceded following his quick throw-out, Pokatilov explained such episodes through the model itself: “This is our game, and we build it precisely on this.”

The model, however, also makes demands of him: to match the pattern of play Dambrauskas is building, Sabah’s captain will need to raise the standard of his play with his feet considerably.

After the match, Pokatilov saw things differently: in his view, the scoreline did not reflect the game, the goals conceded were the result of individual errors, and he had seen nothing extraordinary in United’s combination play.

The match in numbers

Source: FotMob, Opta data.

There are two sides to these numbers. The gap in shots on target and expected goals shows how unequal the quality of chances was at the two ends. But 42% possession and 390 accurate passes away to an English giant are the figures of a team that tried to play its own football rather than simply defend. For perspective, Azerbaijani clubs have played four Champions League away matches in England and lost all of them, with an aggregate score of 19-2. Qarabag lost 6-0 to both Chelsea and Liverpool and 3-2 to Newcastle.

The lesson of Old Trafford was spelled out by the coach himself, and it is not about choosing between courage and caution, but about coordination.

When the midfield goes to press, the defence has to follow, and the first pass from the goalkeeper has to withstand pressure. Otherwise, the space left behind becomes something an opponent of this class will not forgive.

But the analysis of mistakes should not obscure what matters most. Dambrauskas took on the club under whose crest he once started out as a youth coach, and carried himself through the evening with a dignity that was appreciated in Manchester too: Carrick acknowledged that Sabah are very difficult to play against, and the Lithuanian’s warm words about United did not go unnoticed among home supporters on social media.

His team neither hid nor abandoned its principles at one of the world’s most famous stadiums, and the roughly 600 supporters who travelled to Manchester saw a Sabah side that kept trying to play its own football until the final whistle.

At home, the club is continuing the cycle that began with last season’s league title and cup: the team has made a confident start to its title defence and thrashed Zira 5-0 before travelling to England.

On 13 October, Sabah host Slavia Prague, and it only remains to wish them luck, in the hope that this very evening brings Azerbaijan’s champions their first win in the league phase of the Champions League.

Author: Zenga

Read in other languages:

“Sabah”ın dəst-xətti Kerrikin modelinə qarşı: “Old Trafford”dakı məğlubiyyətin təhlili

Идентичность «Сабаха» против модели Каррика: разбор поражения на Олд Траффорд