Andy Carroll - Best Striker in the World

[Charly]

The problem for me is that we quite clearly seem to play better without him on the pitch. Does Dalglish have the balls to drop a £35m man, that he may have asked for (It may have been him, it may have been Commoli)?

My other worry is that he seems to me to be actually pretty **** in the air, from what I have seen.

Either way, he is not worth a quarter of what we have paid for him at the moment. For £35m you expect something amazing. It may just be a lack of fitness, but he has had a while to get fit. But our problem in both games has been with our centre forward failing to produce any credible threat.

I would drop him, and push Kuyt up front (and I used to hate Kuyt up front). Dalglish gets the best out of him, and he is surprisingly good at playing a faster passing game that we were using to carve teams apart last year.

[Mostar]

Let's be little serious here

[Chris]

Does Dalglish have the balls to drop a £35m man, that he may have asked for (It may have been him, it may have been Commoli)?

Cant believe you're even asking that! If he feels its right he'll drop him, just like he had no qualms subbing him yesterday.

[G]

The problem with Carroll is he cost 12.5m more than Suarez. When you see the quality the latter has then the former will be able to do little to justify his price to many people.

[Mostar]

Suarez is finished product and Andy clearly is not yet.

Definitely not good enough at the present time to justify the price tab but he's bought for the future and his value is based on potential not on his current skill set.

[Charly]

Cant believe you're even asking that! If he feels its right he'll drop him, just like he had no qualms subbing him yesterday.

Come on. There are lots of managers who wont drop a player that they favour, for whatever reason. Houllier had Heskey for example.

Dropping a player that cost £35m, is bascially saying you dont have confidence in them. In any other profession, wasting that sort of cash would get you the sack. I know it as a panic buy. which obviously backfired in itself, as he was injured for most of the rest of the season. But that money could have bought an Aguero (not saying he would have come).

At the end of the day, when you spend that sort of money on a player, then you are building a team around him to challange for the title. Not sure thats what we have. Hope I am wrong, but on the evidence so far, even if he does start playing well, he is the wrong player for Kennys style of play. Hes a bit expensive for plan B.

[Baracus]

Andy Carroll's Fee + Henderson's Fee = Aguero's fee +Augero's wages for 4 years

[Mostar]

It doesn't matter any more.

He's here and here to stay.

Little more patience.

Needs time.

He'll get better.

[topscorer]

Come on. There are lots of managers who wont drop a player that they favour, for whatever reason. Houllier had Heskey for example.

Dropping a player that cost £35m, is bascially saying you dont have confidence in them. In any other profession, wasting that sort of cash would get you the sack. I know it as a panic buy. which obviously backfired in itself, as he was injured for most of the rest of the season. But that money could have bought an Aguero (not saying he would have come).

At the end of the day, when you spend that sort of money on a player, then you are building a team around him to challange for the title. Not sure thats what we have. Hope I am wrong, but on the evidence so far, even if he does start playing well, he is the wrong player for Kennys style of play. Hes a bit expensive for plan B.

Everyone gets hung up on the Carroll fee but it's been made clear by the owners that we would never have paid 35m for Carroll if Chelsea hadn't paid 50m for Torres.

They valued Torres as being worth 15m more than Carroll and then it was up to Chelsea how much they wanted to buy Torres.

In my opinion it's Chelsea that was mad, I doubt we ever expected them to go as high as 50m. Mike Ashley probably couldn't believe his luck when we kept going back to him with a higher offer.

Fabregas went for 35m which is probably closer to what Torres was worth and then we'd have only gone as high as 20m for Carroll. Considering we paid a similar amount for Henderson and the January transfer market normally demands a premium that probably would have been about right.

From a psychological, moral, political and marketing point of view the new owners could not be seen to sell our best player and not spend the money in the first transfer window. It would have been suicidal.

You need to put everything in context, it's not fair on Carroll or Dalglish to say that we 'wasted' 35m on him. Chelsea spent the money, not us.

He's only 21, I accept he hasn't had the best of starts to his career but that doesn't mean he's not a great player. He needs to get fit and to mature before we see his full potential.

Not every buy is going to be an instant hit.

[Charly]

Not every buy is going to be an instant hit.

I see that. But at the same time, you look at a players traits when you are assessing them, and regardless of the fee, Andy Carroll does not suit our style of play. This has been bourne out by the games themsleves in which he has played. We have looked disjointed. When he has not played we are treated to the sort of free flowing football that we havent seen in a long time.

Now, Carroll is as you say very young. But I dont think he is the most technically gifted player either. So he may be a bit limited in the style of his game. But he does need to start showing that he can hold the ball up, head the ball, and make decent runs, which are bread and butter for any striker, and something he seems to be struggling with at the moment.

He may just need games to get into the groove, but its a bit of a worry that we dont have anyone else who can effectively play that position. Suarez and Maxi like to drop off, and Ngog is too small, and Kuyt is too slow. Id still go with Kuyt, as he started to knock them in last season.

I guess its still early days for Carroll, but lets face it. Most of us have nothing better to do the individually analyse each players performance, and unless he starts to noticably improve, he will start to get a bit of stick. I remember when Crouch signed, he took ages to score. But the crowd were patient because he showed skill and intelligence, and made a big contribution in other ways. Thats what we need to start seeing.

[MrMichael]

Everyone gets hung up on the Carroll fee but it's been made clear by the owners that we would never have paid 35m for Carroll if Chelsea hadn't paid 50m for Torres.

They valued Torres as being worth 15m more than Carroll and then it was up to Chelsea how much they wanted to buy Torres.

In my opinion it's Chelsea that was mad, I doubt we ever expected them to go as high as 50m. Mike Ashley probably couldn't believe his luck when we kept going back to him with a higher offer.

Fabregas went for 35m which is probably closer to what Torres was worth and then we'd have only gone as high as 20m for Carroll. Considering we paid a similar amount for Henderson and the January transfer market normally demands a premium that probably would have been about right.

From a psychological, moral, political and marketing point of view the new owners could not be seen to sell our best player and not spend the money in the first transfer window. It would have been suicidal.

You need to put everything in context, it's not fair on Carroll or Dalglish to say that we 'wasted' 35m on him. Chelsea spent the money, not us.

He's only 21, I accept he hasn't had the best of starts to his career but that doesn't mean he's not a great player. He needs to get fit and to mature before we see his full potential.

Not every buy is going to be an instant hit.

What a very sensible post.... you sure you're on the right forum?

[Fosterbloke]

Now, Carroll is as you say very young. But I dont think he is the most technically gifted player either. So he may be a bit limited in the style of his game. But he does need to start showing that he can hold the ball up, head the ball, and make decent runs, which are bread and butter for any striker, and something he seems to be struggling with at the moment.

Sorry mate but you really weren't paying attention during the match. I can recall two great pieces of forward play that could have resulted in a goal. The first was the run which dragged a defender away for Henderson to head at goal and the second was the header which the keeper tipped away.

Against Sunderland he was wrongly (in my opinion) judged to have fouled the defender and tucked away with a great finish.

I don't look at him as a £35m player, I look at him as a Liverpool player that offers us options and a good mentality.

[topscorer]

I agree that we need another striker, regardless of what anyone thinks of Carroll.

Suarez has had a good 20 games with us, hit the ground running and was already a proven international when we bought him so of course the whole team looks a lot better when he starts. That's great and we are all so excited everytime he goes on the pitch and touches the ball but it's unfair to criticize Carroll because he hasn't achieved the same and 'cost more'.

You could say Carroll is a summer signing since he played so little in the second half of the season so we have 4 or 5 new players in the team and it will take time for them to get used to each other.

I think Suarez makes things happen, you could put him with any other 10 players and he will make things happen whereas Carroll is more reliant on the other players in the team. That's one of the reason why we aren't seeing the best of Carroll at the moment and he hasn't made the same 'impact' as Suarez, in my opinion.

Plus he's younger, less mature and not fit enough at the moment.

I think we shouldn't start judging Carroll too much until November/December and we'll start to get an idea of his potential in the second half of this season but it's in 2 or 3 years that we'll really see the best in him.

Just like Lucas & Crouch, for different reasons, he will need to get game time to develop and fully integrate into the team. As long as Suarez is playing and we keep winning he will be fine and we will be fine but lets not make the same mistake that so many of us made with Lucas and put undue pressure on him we need to support him in the same way as we did Crouchie.

Well that's what I think anyway, but the main thing for me is that we should stop thinking of him as a 35m player, he isn't and wasn't that was determined by Chelseas decision to go crazy in January

[topscorer]

What a very sensible post.... you sure you're on the right forum?

Wine, I'm a different person when on the Bacardi

[Icon]

I can't understand what's happened to him - at Newcastle he was fearless, winning 90% of headers. Now he is so **** scared to go for a header, it's amazing! The player who scared the life out of Arsenal's defence last season at the Emirates did absolutely nothing yesterday, nothing!
I just don't get it...

Apparently not .