Barney Ronay's magic pen

In short, the man can write. Ronay's brilliant latest reminded me about his gift for writing about Andy Carroll. A sample:

"...Who could forget Kevin Nolan's close range overhead-hook goal for West Ham 
against Wigan last month, fed by a perfectly angled flick on from Andy Carroll, 
who has flourished under Sam Allardyce in the siege tower role, a totemic 
attacking presence to be winched and juddered into position, trundling
wheels caked with mud, filling the skies with his armoured aerial bulk."
Full article here.

"...Because he is a good team man Carroll will continue to run willingly, 
lumbering sideways like a drunken horse, still doing his "passing", addressing 
the ball with the finesse of a man booting an old hubcap along a motorway
verge. But what he really wants to do is fly free, wrenching his neck
muscles majestically, toppling like a collapsed telephone mast, seeking the
kind of perfect swinging cross Joey Barton would often launch in search of
that club-like forehead. 
... "It was a lonely role for Andy Carroll," Gary Lineker mused on Wednesday
night, after a game in which Carroll could occasionally be seen flopping zanily
about the City penalty area, as though someone had thrown a mattress on to the
pitch from a helicopter."
Full article here.

"...it featured Andy Carroll, no longer constrained by the more
mannered demands of playing centre-forward for Liverpool – where he seemed
always a little baffled and corseted, shoulders slumped, like some captive
primate brought back from the new world on an Elizabethan spice ship, forced to 
wear a ruff and frock coat and batter away at the violin with his great hairy 
hands, paraded as a Frenchman, taunted by braying courtiers, dreaming of bananas
– and now transformed into a boisterously uninhibited presence in the West Ham
attack.

... This is essentially what he does, freed to roam and leap and bound in his
unfettered state, occasionally wheeled out across the mud flats like a creaking
artillery gun in order to unleash another fearsome left-footed goal-clunk...."
Full article here.