Liverpool's Andy Carroll fails to convince in defeat by Manchester City At Newcastle this was seen as his great strength. At Liverpool it has tended to look like a liability. January is crunch-time, a concept much loved by newspapers but one which happens to fit in the cases both of Carroll and Chelsea's Fernando Torres - together the subject of £85 million worth of business. Liverpool lost a £22.8million striker for eight games and will now fall back on a £35million No9. Within minutes of the decision not to contest the Luis Suárez verdict the lights of Manchester City's icy palace fell on Carroll and left him with nowhere to hide. This weekend brings the first anniversary of Kenny Dalglish's return to the Anfield throne. Imagine telling him this time last year that the 12-month point would pass with questions of politics and race eclipsing the romance King Kenny came down from the ambassadorial floor to impart. A manager who returned to complete unfinished business from his first spell in charge proceeds through a second coming amid a pervasive smell of shame and acrimony. In the narrowest sense the Suárez saga reached an ugly halt when the starting whistle blew for this match towards the end of the Christmas marathon. Liverpool have no choice now but to chase the top five teams without their most potent and elusive player. By entering purdah the best of the club's recent signings diverts unforgiving scrutiny to the least successful, pound-for-pound. Liverpool's best strike-combination is undoubtedly Suárez and Craig Bellamy, but the former is now banned while Bellamy, who arrived for free, is seldom able to play twice a week. The Uruguayan with the shaky grasp of European racial etiquette is out until the trip to Old Trafford on Feb 11. What a posh garden party that is going to be. So the stock taking on Dalglish's first year back in charge will proceed without his greatest asset there to bring a dash of the 1970s and 80s to a heavily rebuilt side. The first-half here was not auspicious. First a speculative long-range clip from Sergio Agüero bounced under Pepe Reina, then Yaya Touré rose to head home a corner, all inside 32 minutes, before a second-half James Milner penalty made it 3-0. Like so many teams this season Liverpool laboured against the movement and spatial awareness of Agüero and David Silva. Ruinous instability preceded the return of the king. Rafa Benítez and Roy Hodgson had both been sacked and the club taken over amid a long phase of rancour and drift. Liverpool was a club of much bitterness and mistrust. Hodgson's misfortune was to be in a job with a Messiah on his shoulder and expectations were low when Dalglish set about improving on the club's worst start since 1928. In his first campaign an emphasis on unity and the sheer force of Dalglish's personality propelled the team to sixth place in the table. Step one was the application of iconic managerial status. Step two is always money, and Liverpool have spent a lot of it, especially on Carroll, Suárez, Jordan Henderson, Charlie Adam and Stewart Downing. With Steven Gerrard bedevilled by injury (he joined the action from the bench on 55 minutes) the onus has fallen heavily on these Liverpool players to make a great leap forward. Progress, though, tends to be incremental. One sign of Carroll's progress is that his heading is becoming more decisive or emphatic, as it was at Newcastle. In his earliest Liverpool days the ball seemed to loop off his forehead where once it left his brow like a bullet. Speed off the mark remains his biggest weakness. Over 40 yards he develops a decent thoroughbred gallop and covers the ground quite menacingly. But the modern game is about darting movement, tight spaces and anticipation, and Carroll is not built for such tests. Laying a ball off in midfield he sometimes resembles a schoolboy turning and desperately trying to turn on an afterburner to take him into a goalscoring position. Before the age of speed teams were often built around mighty centre-forwards who were served by wingers. Carroll lacks the natural brilliance to revive this vanished age and Liverpool have discovered that their best assets lie elsewhere: in the sometimes lightning strikes of Bellamy, Suarez, Maxi Rodriguez and Stewart Downing, on his day. You could say Liverpool bought a weapon they subsequently found they had no use for. Or it could just be that Carroll needs to learn, and offer more. Deep down they must know that winter just turned harder because their best fit player committed an offence he still refuses to acknowledge.