The play in the first 70 yards of the pitch so far this season has resembled glimpses of greatness. But the action in the final third has instead brought back memories of my Great Grandmother staggering around her chalet on a frame whilst getting my name painfully wrong at every honest attempt she made.
Before you start wondering what I’m on about I am a long suffering Crystal Palace fan in my seventeenth year as a season ticket holder. This season has so far been refreshing in many ways- the club has new owners who now have control of the ground and all the revenue that comes from it, and more noticeably the style of football is far more attractive, for in the past eight games Palace have strung together more passes under George Burley than they did in their two and half years under Neil Warnock.
But football is a results driven business and before last Tuesday Palace had lost their previous five matches in which they have scored just twice, with one being an own goal, despite keeping possession for large periods of every game and producing a quite breathtaking first half performance away to Portsmouth in the Carling Cup which I would happily sell my car, my soul and my girlfriend just to bottle up and give to the players every now and then.
What feels strange however is that ever since I have been a Palace fan the team has included strikers who would regularly feature at the top of the Championship goal scorers list, and now we don’t have one.
Chris Armstrong, Dougie Freedman, Neil Shipperley, Andy Johnson and Clinton Morrison averaged fifteen goals plus a season between them during their time at Palace and have all spent their careers either in the upper echelons of the Championship or the lower regions of the Premiership. (Quite what we would do for one of them now as I watch Pablo Counago and Anthony Gardner both miss chances at Reading that my previously mentioned Great Grandmother would have buried)
Consequently, as I sat at the Madjeski Stadium paying an outrageous £27 to watch my team pass it sideways at every opportunity against a side playing just one up front, I found myself asking; where have all the strikers gone? Why can’t we get in behind a team anymore? Why is it that I have seen just one hat trick from a Palace player since August 2007? And how come that on loan striker James Vaughan can score for fun on FIFA 2010 but not in real life? (In fairness to Vaughan I wrote this part before he scored his a hat trick against Portsmouth last Tuesday.)
Then, as I look through the line ups in the Sunday papers, I realise that the art of having a potent strike partnership is virtually gone. Instead the defensive midfield partnership now seems more important as Manchester City buy yet another holding midfielder.
Where are the Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole style of strike partnerships these days? Whatever happened to teams like the Newcastle of the mid nineties who had Les Ferdinand and Alan Shearer single handedly terrorising back fours? And why couldn’t I have been old enough to watch Mark Bright and Ian Wright play for Palace?
When you look at the lineups put out in the Premiership the truth is that only one of the top teams consistently plays two up front and that is Tottenham. What summed it up the most for me was listening to Alex McLeish after his Birmingham team produced a brilliant display to somehow only draw with Liverpool 0-0. Afterwards McLeish lamented not having a goal scorer at his disposal and therefore being unable to break Liverpool down. But McLeish has eight strikers in his squad and is undoubtedly one of the shrewdest managers to work the transfer market, (he must be considering the great success he has had at St Andrews) so what does this tell you about how hard it is to find goalscorers these days?
The question is why is there currently such a dearth of goalscoring strikers? One reason is undoubtedly the more continental style of play and the more continental style of manager having an impact on the Premier League. Not many foreign managers play 4-4-2 and the fact that the only top team to play this way is managed by an Englishman speaks volumes.
Another reason offered is that the price of losing games is now so great that managers feel as if they have to put safety first and put five in midfield basing much of their play around one man’s ability to play box to box, much like Liverpool do.
As a consequence of this it is now the dynamic midfielders that get lauded by youngsters. When I was growing up I dreamt of being Alan Shearer, Teddy Sheringham, Neil Shipperley or Ian Wright- the man who runs on to the end of things (or in Shipps’s case stumbles on to the end of things) and puts it away. Now, with so many full games being shown on TV, kids are exposed to different parts of the game other than just scoring goals and appreciate the overall performance of a player far more, and therefore try to emulate the kind of footballer that can defend and then create opportunities from the back.
This could be why England can’t bring goalscorers on when it matters but instead call on the likes of Shaun Wright Phillips and Emile Heskey. In a way it’s logical to suggest that football is just evolving like every other industry does. My PE teacher once tried to convince me that back when football started teams would play a formation of 10 up front and 1 in goal because passing was outlawed (I told him recently in an email that sometimes I think this rule is still very much alive and well after two and a half years of Neil Warnock) so all a team did was break and it was the keeper against the man with possession. Then, back in the 1950’s, the 4-2-4 formation was prevalent and wingers such as Stanley Matthews dominated games. So now we are apparently living in the era of playing one up front and focusing on goalscoring midfielders such as Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard.
So who knows what the fashion will be in another twenty years time? After all one must assume that if Sam Allardyce honestly believes he is the man for Real Madrid then anything is possible in the mind of a football manager.
In the meantime however I will keep plowing on in the hope that George Burley can persuade Dimitar Berbatov to take a wage cut. We’ve got Derby away this weekend – would you like to buy my car?
