Larry Ryan: With strikers, do we know where the goal is?

Managers constantly look out for a ‘proven’ goalscorer, grown elsewhere, unable to trust themselves to guide one of their own in this mysterious trade.

EVERYTHING BUT GOALS: Bought to be a goalscorer, Darwin Nunez is instead an agent of chaos, a pinball machine swung around on the end of a wrecking ball crane. Picture: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

Has the noble art of goalscoring ever really attracted the great thinkers? If we were to tot up the sum of intelligence in this crucial area, it might amount to the great goalscorers ‘knowing where the goal is’. A knowledge no doubt assisted by the age-old advice: ‘The goals don’t move, son’.

Beyond that, even football’s finest minds are more or less content to leave things in the lap of the gods. There are ‘born’ goalscorers, ‘natural’ goalscorers, ‘instinctive’ goalscorers. As if knocking a ball into the net is one area beyond the scope of modern education techniques.