The Chinese Super League’s transfer window closed today.
Clubs such as Shanghai Shenhua, Jiangsu Suning and Guangzhou Evergrande have manage to spent hundreds of millions of pounds buying high profile players from various countries but one country that the Chinese have struggled to crack is England.
There have been rumours suggesting that Wayne Rooney could be subject to huge mega bid to go to China, however he has recently come out confirming his stay in the Premier League. A lot of high profile English players in the Premier League are figureheads for their clubs, I cannot see the likes of Harry Kane, John Stones and Daniel Sturridge leaving due to the fact that they would be out of the limelight for a potential call up from England manager Gareth Southgate.
This leads us to English players who play for lower ranked teams, who knock on the door of the England senior squad but fail to get called up. Yes, I’m talking about Andy Carroll. Andy isn’t getting an England call up now, so he won’t be getting one abroad.
There is no doubt that Andy Carroll – when fit – is an enforcer for West Ham upfront, terrorising defences and goalkeepers in the box and getting on the end of set pieces. I’m a huge fan of Andy’s, and always enjoy watching him play, but I just cannot resist the temptation of selling him China. West Ham could get an overvalued windfall of £20m for Carroll, plus relaxing the weekly wage budget by a £130k.
Financially this would allow the club to have the ammunition to go big and buy a world class centre forward with aspirations of playing in the Premier League.
But why sell Andy with a few months left of the season to go? At this current stage of the campaign, we’re are nowhere near making European football via a league spot and are playing some decent football, almost ensuring our safety in top flight football for another season.
A mid-table finish is likely – I predicted that we would finish 13th comfortably at the start of the season. If Andy went, we would have some backup to see us through until the end of the season. Ayew has returned from AFCON, Sakho is due back in training very soon, Calleri looks promising again when he plays and Antonio’s versatility proves he can play upfron. We also have Fletcher and we could even call back in-form striker Martinez from Oxford. So we have enough until the end of the season to get us over the line.
Carrol”s fitness cannot be relied on week in, week out, as we’ve seen recently. His lack of appearances clearly affects the way the team plays. We’re too reliant on Carroll but if he wasn no longer an option to turn to, we could see a new way of trying to score goals.
Maybe forcing our hands will prove to be the right way of dealing with our striker problems. Selling Andy to China was definitely worth considering and it could even be suggested that the club was keeping him wrapped up in cotton wool by not making him available for games, just in case a last minute bid happened.
What if we did get a £20m bid and Andy failed a medical?
Either way, with the Chinese Super League’s transfer window now closed, Andy remains a West Ham player and we’ll have to wait until the summer to see whether he does end up making the switch.
