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Very Specific Football Question No.49: Would Andy Carroll rather have a laugh or a career?

“I’m still the 15-20 goal man!” tweeted a surprisingly upbeat Andy Carroll in the immediate aftermath of his most recent crocking - a knee injury suffered in West Ham’s match against Astra Giurgiu in August.

It seemed an optimistic prediction at the time, given the striker’s condition (not to mention the fact he had never scored 15 goals in a Premier League season before, let alone 20).

Now it seems like a downright silly one. Hammers manager Slaven Bilic revealed this week that the Carroll’s recovery is going “slower than we expected”, adding, with a bewildered sigh, that he has no idea when the ponytailed Adonis will be fit.

The initial prognosis for Carroll’s knock was four to six weeks, but more than two months have passed since then. His most notable appearance during this period occurred on 27 September, when he was observed by several members of the public “socialising” in east London’s trendy Shoreditch district.

It was the day after a club-endorsed night on the town - Bilic’s struggling squad having been encouraged to indulge in some team bonding and let their hair down - and it turned out that Carroll’s hair would be let down the most, in every sense.

At 7am he was pictured getting a late-night/early morning McDonald’s with team-mates Aaron Cresswell and Darren Randolph, the rest of the players having cabbed it home earlier in the evening. A fitting end to a night of merriment for the three last men standing.

But while Cresswell evidently called it a night after eating his McChicken Sandwich, Carroll and Randolph kept going.

They were pictured outside a bar in Old Street at 2.37pm enjoying laddish giggles and “shouting at birds”, according to one alleged witness on Twitter.

By 3.37pm, Carroll himself had joined in the social media fun – posting a photo of his cracked iPhone screen and giving every indication that he was still three sheets to the wind.

“Back in the day my parties had the wish I was there effect,” he exclaimed.

We don’t doubt it. Carroll’s fondness for fun is legendary. This is the man who was forced to live with Kevin Nolan in his Newcastle days just to keep his hedonistic lifestyle in check. Even today, no summer passes without video footage emerging of the striker bopping on a podium in a Las Vegas nightspot.

It’s one of the benefits of being injured so often that you can at least spend your wages (very large ones in Carroll’s case) on going out and having a right old laugh.

Or is it?

Given that the two overriding things we know about Andy Carroll are that 1) he is injured a lot and 2) he likes going out of an evening, would it be unfair to suggest that perhaps the two things are connected?

Not unfair at all, actually. There is not a physio in the world who would recommend boozing during rehabilitation.

“Alcohol has a negative impact on recovery after injury,” says this medical journal and countless others like it.

“In simple terms, alcohol negatively affects muscle recovery, slowing down the healing process and ensuring your injury stays around much longer than necessary,” states another.

Of course, having a few beers doesn’t mean a knee injury never heals. For example, Cresswell was also crocked at the time of the 7am McDonald’s trip, and he is already back in action.

But it does mean that anyone who wanted to give themselves the best possible chance of recovery – for example, someone with a frustratingly chronic or recurring muscular issue - would abstain. And that’s something Andy Carroll has never been prepared to do. He loves the craic too much.

Despite his wretched injury record, Carroll’s managers at West Ham have persisted with him for two reasons. 1) He’s on an £85,000-a-week, long-term contract that no other club would touch, and 2) When fit, he’s a devastating centre-forward. He proves the latter fact every season, if only for a few games.

But those who known Carroll best have done little to refute the accusation that he is somehow culpable for his own bad luck.

As Bilic said following one of Carroll’s recent “comebacks”: “Is he going to look after himself, work hard, train, rest, to maintain his fitness, or to even make it better? Then, and only then, he will become a great asset for us.

"It is up to him. But I expect him to stick to what he was like recently. He would be very, very stupid to do otherwise.”

Even Sam Allardyce, a well-known Carroll devotee who pulled out every stop to get his man to Upton Park in 2012, has been surprisingly candid in his criticism of the striker.

“Andy Carroll could be an ever better player if he pushed himself and put the work in. He tells you he does - but he doesn’t always do it,” Big Sam said last year.

“He doesn’t really like watching football and isn’t interested in the history of the game. He treats life a little bit too casually. He also gets himself into situations off the pitch which a manager can do without - and so can he.”

The nature of the “situations off the pitch” is never fully disclosed, but his Shoreditch shenanigans with Randolph may offer some clue. Carroll has reportedly denied being drunk that day, but an ongoing club investigation into the incident has yet to clear his name.

Carroll may still consider himself the “15-20 goal man” but the fact remains that he has only once achieved that figure in a season – and that was in the Championship, almost seven years ago.

There is no doubt he would dearly love to go an entire campaign without getting injured again, but is he prepared to make his life more boring to achieve it?

Maybe it’s just a severe case of FOMO that prevents Carroll from staying indoors watching Coronation Street. But opportunities to get a 7am Maccy Ds will always be there while, as Allardyce notes, “he needs realise that a football career passes by in the blink of an eye.”

Follow @darlingkevin on Twitter

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