PANIC buying is usually associated with blokes on Christmas Eve or petrol stations when stocks are running low.

You can now add Liverpool Football Club to that list.

And, to be fair, a lot of other clubs who’ve been scratting around like robins in the snow looking for a crumb.

After the fiasco of hiring Roy Hodgson and then giving him fewer than 20 Premier League games to turn them from chumps to champs, their season is already as good as over.

Yet after an outrageous stroke of good fortune – selling a sulking striker who has scored goals only when he’s felt like it – they’ve already blown the lot on two men of highly-debatable pedigree.

Luis Suarez is best remembered for his handball in the last minute of the World Cup quarter-final which helped Uruguay end Ghana’s dream of becoming the first African nation to reach the last four.

He may have been given the freedom of Montevideo, but he is vilified on an entire continent.

Suarez has a terrific goalscoring record in Holland, but then so did Afonso Alves, who was going to take Middlesbrough by storm, and who was so bad he is now plying his trade in Qatar or some part of the football-mad Emirates.

As for Andy Carroll, leaving Tyneside will either make or break him.

His love of the night life has led him into more scrapes than James Bond – now he’s got a £35m price tag on his head.

Liverpool’s fans must be shaken if not yet stirred.

I can think of better ways of splashing £56m, like halving the national debt, building a few hospitals, or even helping Australia’s flood victims.

Charlie Adam, of Blackpool, would have cost a third of Carroll’s fee and represented better value, while Aston Villa may have picked up the best bargain of the lot in goalscoring American midfielder Michael Bradley.

It will take Suarez and Carroll time to adjust to life on Merseyside, and in a business that demands instant results I’m not sure they’ll be given that rare commodity.