No, my point is that Dalglish, once he had brought Carroll in for a huge amount of money, didn't then play to his strengths. ie. he didn't have a plan in place.

I don't see how this is controversial.

Are you actually trying to claim that Kenny sent his team out with orders to supply Carroll and they were pumping in those early diagonal crosses all day long but Carroll was too lazy to attack them?

In the alternate universe I have apparently just arrived from, what happened was this: inverted wingers taking the ball in to the corner and tarting around with it before finally, maybe, delivering a cross when Carroll had stopped running and was flat-footed with two markers. He's a big man, he can't just suddenly fly into the air like Karl-Heinz Riedle. If you don't get the cross in early, it's no good to him.

If you are relying on Carroll for your goals, you need to give him the right supply, and inverted wingers is the opposite way to do this. Carroll got frustrated, dropped back looking for the ball, and then when a cross did come in maybe once or twice a game, he was as surprised as anyone.

You're right that claiming that Carroll would have been incredibly prolific had he been given the right kind of supply is hyperbolic, but the point I'm making is that the experiment was never even tried. It's telling that Gerrard and Carroll connected better for England than they ever did for Liverpool.

What? We should've dropped him into the U21s if he did anything like that.

Oh bollocks. Every striker who's not getting a sniff of the ball does that during the course of a game. It's a normal response. Torres did it, Sturridge does it.