As we all know Carroll is out with injury for good few more weeks and I think this could be a bigger problem than first expected. The reason for me saying this is because when Carroll first joined the mighty Hammers, Nolan was scoring for fun. Nolan was scoring on a regular basis and we were all counting on him to bang the goals in. Now with Carroll injured he doesn’t seem close to scoring.
Everyone can remember the formidible partnership of Carroll and Nolan when they were both at Newcastle. This was more evident in the season that Carroll earned his £35 million pound move to Liverpool to become the most expensive English player to date. When Carroll joined West Ham I was very pleased. This was mainly because I thought he had a good Euro 2012 scoring a superb header against Sweden, something he is renowned for. I thought that following this he would continue his good form into the new season, scoring more goals. Sadly this didn’t really happen as so far this season he has only scored 1 goal, but he is capable of holding up the ball and dominating in the air.
However the total opposite happened with Nolan. This is because when Big Andy joined Nolan got off to a fantastic start to the season. Before we knew it he had 5 goals and was our top goalscorer. With Andy out injured now, Nolan doesn’t look like he is going to score. I recently went to the Everton game which was quite a poor performance to say the least and most of the time I didn’t know that Nolan was playing. This might seem harsh to pick just Nolan out after a poor team performance but you need your captain to keep you going through matches like the Everton one. You also need them to lead but Nolan looked lost.
So that leaves me to ask the question is Carroll the key to Nolan? Personally I think that he very well could be because Nolan hasn’t scored while Carroll has been out injured.