Will he make Liverpool fans sing or just very cross on the Mersey?
Last April I wrote a piece for FootballFanCast about Andy Carroll in the aftermath of the girlfriend-related tête-à-tête with Newcastle teammate Steven Taylor that resulted in the latter reportedly requiring hospital treatment for a broken jaw. Back then, Carroll was a Championship striker with a modestly good scoring record cursed by off-the-field dramas that threatened to derail his career. Now he’s a Premier League striker with a modestly good scoring record cursed by off-the-field dramas who, following Monday’s events, is worth £35m according to Liverpool.
Who saw that one coming?
Selling Fernando Torres to Chelsea for £50m effectively allowed Kenny Dalglish to take advantage of a 2-for-1 offer and trade in his one recognised centre forward for a pair of new ones. Carroll’s new striker partner, Luis Suárez, is no stranger to trouble either. While one member of Anfield’s remodelled frontline has been quick with his fists in the past – pleading guilty to common assault last October in relation to a charge from 2009 – their new recruit from Ajax bit an opponent on the shoulder in a Dutch league game three months ago. All this suggests that, Carroll and Suárez’s possible merits as a playing partnership aside, Liverpool have almost certainly assembled the most intimidating wrestling tag team the Premier League has ever known.
The incidents that Kenny Dalglish’s new front two have been involved in are so extraordinary that they make the prospect of them playing together all the more compelling. Suárez enjoyed the vilification of football fans everywhere – outside Uruguay and its diaspora anyway – following the deliberate handball against Ghana that deprived the Black Stars of a certain goal and the chance to become Africa’s first ever World Cup semi-finalists. Carroll, meanwhile, starred in “At Home with the Nolans” last year when he was ordered to move in with a teammate’s family as part of his bail conditions following a further charge of assault, this time against another former girlfriend. The charge was later dropped but not before Carroll’s car was torched as it sat on the drive outside Kevin Nolan’s house.
Let’s deal with Carroll’s transfer fee quickly. Of course £35m is a ludicrous amount of money to pay for a striker with only 34 career goals to his name and not yet 90 minutes of international experience behind him, and if Carroll is the eighth most expensive player of all time then it only goes to prove that the gap between cost and value in football is large enough to drive a fleet of chrome-plated Range Rovers through.
As a player, he is coveted because he is exactly the sort of forward that football thought was extinct. The 22-year-old is no carthorse but neither have Liverpool bought him for his technical ability. Carroll comes into his own when the ball is in the air. At set-pieces, he will attack the cross and leap to meet the delivery with the force of a hammer. If a team member plays the ball long then Carroll will do his best to win it or dare his marker to stop him. The player stands well over six feet tall but compare his aerial ability with the almost apologetic way in which, say, Peter Crouch heads the ball. Carroll is an unashamed big-man type of forward.
The money that Liverpool have spent on the player, exaggerated as it is, is a bit like that shelled out for a historical relic previously thought lost to the sands of time. Carroll’s transfer comes less than a month after the sad death of Nat Lofthouse, who scored 285 times for Bolton Wanderers in a fourteen-year period after the Second World War. Lofthouse’s head was arguably his most effective extremity, such was the regularity with which he scored with it. He was such a strong player that he could even use opposing players to strike the ball; in the 1958 FA Cup final, Lofthouse barged Harry Gregg into the net as the Manchester United goalkeeper held the ball.
Alan Shearer fleetingly became the world’s most expensive player in 1996 when Kevin Keegan paid £15m to bring him to Newcastle from Blackburn Rovers, and now Carroll finds his transfer fee jostling with figures parted with in the past for Hernán Crespo and David Villa. Shearer was the last player to match the description of the mythical English centre forward: tall, brave, aggressive, prolific and strong shoulders. Carroll doesn’t tick all the boxes yet – the most important one, scoring goals, needs a little work – but his purchase by Liverpool is an incredible show of faith in a style of play that had its heyday half a century ago but which is still firmly entrenched in English football culture’s psyche.
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