Andy Carroll has said that there was one former Liverpool teammate who would never speak to him during their shared time at Anfield.
The striker had just turned 22 when, in January 2011, he joined the Reds from Newcastle for a then-club record fee of £35m (BBC Sport).
He would spend only a season-and-a-half on Merseyside, scoring 11 goal in 58 games, before joining West Ham on loan in August 2012 (that became a permanent deal the following year).
Carroll was ignored by one player at Liverpool
In an excerpt from his new autobiography Owning It (via Liverpool Echo), Carroll revealed that Joe Cole would continually meet him with a wall of silence when they sat together in the dressing room at Anfield.
The 37-year-old wrote: “The Liverpool dressing room seemed a lot less joined up than at Newcastle – sometimes you just don’t have the right blend of personalities – and some of the lads wouldn’t even speak to me.
“Our pegs in the dressing room were ordered by squad number, so I had [Steven] Gerrard (8) on one side and Joe Cole (10) on the other. Gerrard would ask me what I’d been up to, but Joe was basically mute.
“I’d looked up to him as a kid and I thought he’d take an interest in me given that he’d also been earmarked for great things as a teenager, but he didn’t even say good morning. I’d be thinking, ‘Mate, I’m new here. This isn’t easy; give me something!'”
Carroll went on to explain that, when he and Cole were reunited at West Ham in 2013, he sought answers as to why the ex-Chelsea winger ignored him at Liverpool but was ‘cuddling and high-fiving him’ as teammates in east London.
The former Reds striker detailed: “Joe explained that he’d felt really low at Liverpool, that he knew the club didn’t want him, so he didn’t want to be there. He’d got into the mindset of, ‘Just turn up, keep your head down, do your job and get out.’ He apologised and what had seemed very strange at the time suddenly made sense.”
Carroll and Cole joined Liverpool in an unstable era
The early 2010s were a very strange time at Anfield, with the club driven to the brink of administration by the warring ownership of the late Tom Hicks and George Gillett before the much-welcomed takeover from NESV (now FSG).
When Carroll arrived at Liverpool, they had just sacked Roy Hodgson after a mere half-season in charge and were nowhere near competing for Champions League football, never mind challenging for Premier League glory.
Many of the signings during that unstable era didn’t work out, with the ex-Newcastle striker and Cole being two of the players whose fortunes nosedived from how they fared at their previous clubs.
Thankfully, later in the decade, LFC became a much more stable club under the management of Jurgen Klopp, with he and sporting director Michael Edwards making a series of astute signings in the transfer market.
From the mishmash of personalities which were thrown together at Liverpool in the early 2010s, the decade would end with a much-celebrated group of players who formed an effective chemistry on the pitch and won major trophies in England and Europe.
It was unfortunate that Carroll’s time at Anfield didn’t work out, though he’d still go on to have a fulfilling career in which he scored 54 Premier League goals and won nine caps for his country.