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Andy Carroll Has Reached A Career Tipping Point At West Ham

By Sean Donnelly
Published on: 22:02 PST, Jan 3, 2016

When Andy Carroll left his boyhood club Newcastle United in order to join Liverpool in a club record-breaking £35 million deal in January, 2011, the then 22-year-old looked a safe bet to become England’s leading center-forward for the next decade.

After all, the Gateshead native scored 19 goals in 39 appearances in helping Newcastle gain automatic promotion to the Premier League in 2010 and he netted 11 times in 19 top-flight starts before joining Liverpool midway through the 2010/11 season.

Carroll’s powerful build and 6 foot, 4 inch frame marked him out as the ideal target-man center-forward; a player capable of bullying opposition defenders, winning the ball in the air and retaining possession in order to bring more mobile, creative teammates into play in attacking areas. The Guardian’s Steve Williams, for instance, paralleled the young Carroll to Newcastle great Alan Shearer as early as September, 2009.

“Comparing a 20-year-old with only a handful of first-team appearances to an iconic former captain and record goalscorer is a dangerous game”, Williams conceded. “Yet, the newly capped England Under?21 international could be the star in the making…Carroll’s performance against Plymouth had a coming-of-age feel and brought his second goal in as many games.”

By pairing Carroll with the slighter and more dynamic Luis Suarez, then Liverpool boss Kenny Dalglish looked to have capitalized upon the sale of Fernando Torres to Chelsea by assembling a strike force capable of firing the Anfield club back towards the summit of the Premier League table.

A litany of injuries, however, meant that Carroll’s Liverpool career never really got off the ground.

Although the forward netted in both the semi-finals and final of the 2012 FA Cup – Liverpool finished as runners-up, Dalglish’s successor in the Anfield dugout, Brendan Rodgers, took the decision to move Carroll to West Ham on a loan deal at the start of the 2012/13 season, favoring a more mobile, pass-and-move attacking setup.

Carroll arrived at Upton Park having made only 57 appearances for Liverpool, contributing 11 goals, and there was already a sense that the then 23-year-old risked spurning the potential that had earned him a place in Fabio Capello’s England squad at the 2012 European Championships where he scored the opening goal in a group-stage defeat of Sweden.

From the point of being arrested for an alleged assault on a woman in 2008, Carroll’s career has been plagued by off-field controversies, including breaking a Newcastle teammate’s jaw in 2010. Indeed, the forward’s public behavior became so problematic during the latter stages of his career on Tyneside that he was only granted police bail following one assault charge on the condition that he resided with then Newcastle captain Kevin Nolan until the case was concluded.

Even Capello publicly criticized Carroll’s drinking habits in 2011, and although the forward claimed that he had changed his lifestyle at Liverpool, former West Ham boss, Sam Allardyce, who bought Carroll for a club record £15 million in 2013, reflected in his recent autobiography, Big Sam, that the forward never had the mentality to overcome his injury problems in order to maximize his potential as a footballer.

“He treats life too casually,” Allardyce said. “He also gets himself into situations off the pitch which a manager can do without – and so can he. He needs to be more responsible and realize that a football career passes in the blink of an eye.”

It is in this context that current West Ham boss Slaven Bilic’s comments in the aftermath of Carroll netting his side’s second goal in a 2-0 defeat of Liverpool on Saturday read so interestingly. There was no effusive praise of the forward for his role in helping the Hammers to their first league double over the Merseysiders in 52 years, only a sharp injunction that Carroll has to keep performing in order to prove that he has a future at Upton Park.

“He looks really good and fit and it’s all about him now,” said Bilic. “Is he going to maintain and progress and look after himself, or is he going to go the other way? He has history in that and I’m not his dad, I can’t demand things from him. But I’m expecting that to be fair.”

Now really is fight or flight time for Carroll.

For although no footballer can be legitimately blamed for having weak ankle ligaments, there was always a suspicion that the length and frequency of Carroll’s injury lay-offs were a consequence of his failure to responsibly manage his body away from the training ground.

The first half of Arjen Robben’s career, for instance, was blighted by injury problems perhaps even more severe than Carroll’s. Upon moving to Bayern Munich in 2009, however, the Dutchman worked relentlessly in the gym in order to strengthen core muscle groupings as a means of guarding against further breakdowns. The 31-year-old has since enjoyed one of the most consistent playing-spells of his career.

At 26, Carroll is still young enough to learn from his early folly and focus on staying fit in order to re-stake his claim for a starting spot at both club and international level. With West Ham’s new stadium move, as well as the European Championships on the horizon during the summer, the next six months stand to be decisive in the forward’s career as any move that he may make away from Upton Park is likely to be a step-down.

However, it is a testament to Carroll’s undoubted talent that, when fully fit, Allardyce still rates him as England’s best center-forward and the manner in which he took his goal against Liverpool suggests that he cannot yet be written-out of Roy Hodgson’s summer plans.

[Photo by Steven Pond/Getty Images]

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