Andy Carroll does not miss a beat. He has been asked to provide an illustration of how he knew, in the summer of 2012, that his Liverpool career was over, to describe precisely what it was that convinced him he and Brendan Rodgers could never work together. Straightaway, he accuses the Liverpool manager of lying.

“With Brendan Rodgers, there was a lot going on,” he says. From experience, it is safe to say that as an interviewee, Carroll does not do artifice and he does not do euphemism. He is markedly calm and casual as he describes his dark, final days at Liverpool.

“What he was saying to me and what was actually happening [were different things]. He was telling me one thing to my