Michael Carrick’s love of the game was quickly apparent when he was profiled on the BBC’s Saturday morning children’s television show Live & Kicking in 1995.<\/p>\n
Seated in front of the camera in a Newcastle shirt and surrounded by posters of his idols, including Peter Beardsley, viewers might have felt he was destined to one day represent his boyhood club.<\/p>\n
Newcastle had even attempted to pull out one or two stops to convince Carrick to join.<\/p>\n
Beardsley presented Carrick with a cake on his 13th birthday at St James’ Park while the youngster was invited to play in the prestigious Milk Cup youth tournament a year early.<\/p>\n
However, that trip to Northern Ireland left a lasting impression for all the wrong reasons after a few of the players ‘borrowed’ a Mini and drove it around a car park.<\/p>\n
Carrick ultimately felt more comfortable at West Ham – a long way from home – after spending time touring a host of suitors across the country.<\/p>\n
Although local talents like Lee Clark, Steve Howey, Steve Watson and Robbie Elliott had made the breakthrough into Newcastle’s first-team squad, at the time the club did not even have a reserve side.<\/p>\n
By contrast, at West Ham, there was a clear pathway – and Carrick never looked back.<\/p>\n
This future England international went on to play for the Hammers and Tottenham Hotspur<\/a> before joining Manchester United<\/a>, where he won 18 trophies, including five Premier League titles and the Champions League.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael Carrick’s love of the game was quickly apparent when he was profiled on the BBC’s Saturday morning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-503409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}