What’s Best For ‘Big Andy’?

JANUARY 31st 2011, Andrew Thomas Carroll signs for Liverpool from Newcastle United for a fee of £35 million.

I remember the day well because I was hooked to the Guardian’s transfer blog all morning and when Carroll signed for the club I let out a strange sound that was a mixture of mild excitement with slight incredulity.

I still feel this way today, whenever Andy is warming up to come off the bench, or when his name is on a team-sheet. I don’t quite know why, but something about him makes me think he could be/could do, something awesome. And I don’t think I’m alone.

18 months on though, and we’re still waiting for him to become that beast of a striker that many Reds believe he could be. Which is why Brendan Rodger’s revelation yesterday that he would look in to all aspects of Carroll being loaned out before making a decision have not exactly seen a massive fuss kicked up amongst Liverpool fans.

I appreciate that toward to the end of last season Andy Carroll really started to kick on – not to mention a promising cameo during England’s brief Euro campaign – but a handful of games in which he showed improvement do not really add up to a player that has come on enough since January 2011. So, with that in mind, perhaps it could be of benefit to all parties to let our big striker head out to AC Milan for a bit of continental experience?

I can see a number of positives in a move to the continent, particularly Milan, with the more considered, tactical approach of the game in Italy potentially helping Carroll mature as a player. His record in English football hasn’t exactly been prolific, scoring less than 50 goals in over 150 senior games so far and despite being 23, his game hasn’t really expanded a great deal during that time. He is a big guy who knows how to find the ball with his head; he has the ability to hold up the ball and has a cracking strike on him but it’s rare that he ever works an opportunity for himself to show that off.

Playing in Italy would allow him to become a more patient, mature striker, one that knows when to pick his opportunities and doesn’t become frustrated when he is unoccupied during large swathes of difficult games. Just look at the foreign strikers who have improved their game during spells in Italy: Shevchenko, Ibrahimovic, Batistuta.

But while Carroll may never reach the heights of some of these players, there is a much more apt comparison that could be made with a former AC Milan striker who had a similar early career, a player with whom Andy Carroll shares many attributes: Oliver Bierhoff. The German international was never very highly thought of in his native homeland and moved on to Italy early in his career. After a paltry 33 goals during the first six years of his career in Germany, he went on to become one of Germany’s greatest strikers after finding the Italian game suited his style, with the pinnacle of his career coming at Udinese and Milan in the late 90’s. The Italian game has a way of polishing rough diamonds and could well do for Carroll’s game what it did for Bierhoff’s.
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There is also the cultural aspect to letting Carroll go on loan to a country like Italy. Back in the UK, particularly in a big city like Liverpool, he is under constant scrutiny from the unfairly antagonistic UK press. Not only that, but there is the culture of binge-drinking to contend with and a place like Liverpool only further encourages this, particularly for a young Northern lad like Carroll; the temptations are everywhere. Letting him go out to expand his horizons, learn (a bit) of a new language and experience a bit of a foreign culture will help him to grow up and I can imagine that the player that comes back will be all the better for it.

However, there could also be downsides. The most obvious of which is that we’d be down a striker, and given that we struggled for goals last season this could well be a bad move. It has been reported in the past few days that Roma’s Fabio Borini could be on his way to Liverpool and, in all likelihood, he’s intended to partner Luis Suarez in a front 3, along with one from Gerrard, Maxi, Cole or Bellamy. This could pave the way for Carroll to leave on loan, as he is largely considered to be a ‘plan B’. But this would also mean that we’d be lacking in any discernible ‘plan B’, unless Rodger’s has something else in mind, or some other signing up his sleeve.

Of course, there is also the psychological downside for Carroll, in that he may well feel it is something personal or that he is surplus to requirements. If he gets a taste for life abroad, he may not want to come back to a club that were prepared to loan him out. Which raises the question: if the club are considering loaning a 23 year old out now, after having spent a fortune on him, why not just let him go permanently while we can still get a sizeable fee for him? The answer to that is probably that the loss would be too big and, if it wasn’t, there’d hardly be a queue of clubs lining up to spend good money on him. This is precisely why AC are looking at a loan move, as the club are not going to be bullied over how much they feel the striker’s worth.

All things considered, it certainly is a tough call and I would hate to have to be the man with the final say. Up until the suggestion of a loan move came up, I was still quite firmly in the ‘sell him, while we can’ camp, despite how much we may lose. A temporary move to another big club on the continent would be too good an opportunity for both the player and the club to pass up, though. It would mean he’d have the opportunity to enhance himself, to learn and become a more rounded player and the club would benefit from having more flexibility on the field, a slightly reduced wage bill and would see a potentially better player returning in 12 months time, at no extra cost to ourselves. While the benefits of moving abroad or a season are great though, I feel it would be a mistake to allow Carroll to move within England. To improve as a player he needs to play consistently at a high level. Playing for West Ham (another rumour), or another bottom-10 club will improve him little, in my opinion; he needs to learn how to fit into a team that can alternate systems and play fluidly, and he’ll learn nothing but 4-4-2 and several meanings for the word ‘hoof’ at a club run by Sam Allardyce.

This is all conjecture at this stage of course, and unless the club has some way of ensuring we’re not short of striking options in the coming season, I think it would be a mistake. Should there be a contingency in place however, a loan move to AC Milan or anywhere else in mainland Europe could only benefit both player and club in the long run.
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