West Ham Need New, Permanent Option Up Front to Replace Andy Carroll

West Ham can’t count on Andy Carroll.

Since his loan capture from Liverpool last summer, the striker has made only 24 appearances in all competitions for the Upton Park club.

While his physical attributes and, indeed, performances would seem to mark him out as the ideal Sam Allardyce forward, he simply can’t be depended on to lead the line on a regular basis.

A permanent move from Anfield nearly four months ago seemed to suggest just how highly the Hammers' boss rated Carroll, and given the four goals and four assists the 24-year-old managed in his final nine matches of the 2012-13 campaign, it’s not hard to see why.

At his best, Carroll is the ideal target man for an Allardyce side—the sort of tall, broad centre-forward who can not only put the ball in the back of the net, but knock it down for his teammates as well.

The odds-on winner in every aerial duel he engages in, he is also an underrated contributor on the defensive side of the ball. According to Squawka, Carroll season averaged three defensive actions per match last season.

He simply cannot stay healthy, though. As a result, West Ham need a new, permanent Plan A for the attack.

Since 2009, Carroll has been sidelined with no fewer than eight injuries—many of them significant (ligaments, bones and muscles), with five of them keeping him out of the lineup for at least a month.

In West Ham’s final match last season—a 4-2 win over Reading during which Carroll assisted on a pair of goals—the striker suffered a heel injury that kept him out of his side’s preseason matches ahead of the current campaign.

On Tuesday, the club revealed he had picked up a fresh injury in training.

“Although it is in the same part of his foot as his previous injury, it is a new injury,” the club confirmed to BBC Sport. “There will be no prognosis until he has seen a specialist.”

According to Sami Mokbel of the Daily Mail, there are fears Carroll could be sidelined until 2014, in which case West Ham would need to address a lack of striking depth as quickly as possible.

So far, they have only the Tuesday acquisition of Croatia international Mladen Petric to show for their efforts—the 32-year-old’s five Premier League goals from last season represent the combined offense produced by the club’s other strikers, Ricardo Vaz Te and Modibo Maiga.

In other words, Petric is a stopgap measure.

The thing is, in Carroll’s absence, Allardyce doesn’t have a single proven striker available to him. Given Carroll’s persistent injury woes, it’s surely time the manager presses for a major attacking acquisition in the winter.

Carroll is no longer Plan A for West Ham. His body won’t allow it.

While bandage solutions are all well and good in the short term, going forward, the club will need to spend big and acquire a striker with some pedigree in the January transfer market.