Multiple people to hate rather than Carroll himself. I do acknowledge: he was as thick as pig shit. I remember one game, Boxing Day, against Blackburn, typically flat atmosphere at Anfield, people were shouting, 'You're offside!' and he'd trot onside. That happened all through the match. Bloody hell. But I was told by somebody who knew him from his youth days, he said Carroll right from the start had landed when he jumped on his heels. The Newcastle coaching staff, who in those days just sat about reading the Racing Post, looked at him and muttered, 'That'll fuck his body up,' and then carried on reading. No one corrected him. The result was he was in a god awful mess before we signed him. How the hell we failed to spot how fecked up he was is a scandal. How West Ham failed to realise it is bloody brain-burstingly bizarre. But he's one of the worst-coached players in modern history. And it's usually presented as though it's just 'one of those things'. It could have been corrected when he was a kid.
