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| Andy Carroll signs for West Ham six years after Carlos Tevez's shock signing |
When West Ham fans woke today to the news that Andy
Carroll had signed for the club on a one-year loan deal, few would have
reflected that it was exactly six years to the day that Carlos Tevez and Javier
Mascherano joined the club. The euphoria amongst fans celebrating the capture
of a player signed by Liverpool for £35m less
than two years ago, bore an uncanny resemblance to the excitement felt on that
same day in 2006.
Back then, jubilant
supporters were oblivious to a clause in the contract that would have dire
financial consequences for the club. The £25m fine imposed by the FA (on top of
the £5m Premier League fine) is a liability that will sit on West Ham’s balance
sheet for years to come. But it did not take a great deal of hindsight to reflect
that West Ham signing two of the world’s best players had to be too good to be
true.
The financial penalties were
only half the story. The inability to integrate the Argentinians into the team
turned the ninth-place, FA Cup finalists into relegation certainties. Tevez may
have worked wonders in the final ten matches of the season, but that was the
bare minimum required to undo the disruptive effects of his arrival. It is easy
to laugh at Alan Pardew’s folly in selecting Hayden Mullins and Marlon Harewood
ahead of the Argies – and perhaps he should have thrown a bit more caution to
the wind in the early stages when Mascherano especially failed to hit the
ground running – but this was an all-too-common and real tale of big fishes
struggling to adapt to life in a small pond.
It is testament to the short-term
memory of the football fan that Andy
Carroll’s arrival at Upton Park has been met with near universal approval. Admittedly,
his signing is very different to that of Tevez and Mascherano. Carroll has been
playing in the Premier League for several years, so there should be no need for
a bedding-in period. More importantly, he is anything but a square peg in a
round hole, having been targeted specifically to fit into Sam Allardyce’s style
of play (ie he is there to head in Matt Jarvis’s crosses). But there are still
lessons to be learned from the Tevez saga, that give cause for concern.
Firstly, the
big-fish-small-pond syndrome still holds true. Carroll may not be of the same
ilk as Tevez, but he is still a player who should be playing for a club with
greater ambitions than avoiding relegation. Put simply, he should be playing
for a top-five team. What’s more, he knows that. He has spent the whole summer
trying to resist a move to east London Liverpool reached a deal weeks
ago. Had Carroll wanted to be a West Ham player, this deal would have been tied
up back in July.
It has taken a preseason of
disparaging comments from Brendan Rodgers and a lack of serious interest from
any other club – most notably Newcastle London
Assuming that he does score
the goals that merit the £1.5m loan fee and £3m+ wages, his stock will rise
back to where it was during his peak at Newcastle, and it seems unlikely that
he would choose to stay at West Ham, a club that simply does not have the
resources and infrastructure to compete at the top of the Premier League. The
woeful defensive display at Swansea
If we are going into this
deal happy for Carroll to do a job for us for one season and secure us a place
in next year’s Premier League (when the new, more lucrative TV rights kick in)
then all well and good, but that really makes this acquisition a sticking
plaster, rather than a building block. After years of boom and bust, wouldn’t
some stability and steady progression be preferable?
As with the Tevez-Mascherano
deal, it is the unknowns that are most scary. The motivations behind the deal
are key. We now know that the deal with Kia Joorabchian was made possible because he had
aspirations to buy the club and saw this deal as a way of getting a foot in the
door. But Terry Brown didn’t want to sell the club to him. Hence, the deal was flawed from the outset.
I cannot state the exact motivations
behind this deal, and it is that which worries me. What I do know is that Andy Carroll shares the same agent, Mark Curtis, as
Sam Allardyce. Curtis is also the agent of Matt Jarvis, for whom we have just
paid £10.5m. He also became the agent of James Tomkins, shortly before he was
rewarded with a new, much-improved contract. Read into that what you will.
I wish it were otherwise, but
25 years of supporting West Ham has taught me that if something feels too good
to be true, it almost definitely is. A club with £80m debt paying £80,000-a-week wages is too good to be true. In fact, it's not really good at all, is it.
Follow Love In The Time Of Collison @OnWestHam
Follow Love In The Time Of Collison @OnWestHam
