Larry Ryan: With strikers, do we know where the goal is?
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.
Managers constantly look out for a ‘proven’ goalscorer, grown elsewhere, unable to trust themselves to guide one of their own in this mysterious trade. Even a control freak like Pep, anxious to micromanage every moment of a football season, throws his hands up in baffled wonder when he sees Erling Haaland banging them in week after week, reluctant to take any credit or give any to the coaches Erling met along his way. “It is a born instinct he has carried from the cradle.”
Pep’s disciple, Arteta, arguably craves control even more, tends to pre-programme most of his players’ movements, yet fears this may be the one speciality where he’ll never bring a joystick into his technical area.
Last week he complained about the nuisances of coaching goalscoring to James McNicholas of The Athletic: “That’s probably the hardest thing to replicate in football - the timing, the behaviour of the opponent, the distance between the ball and the feet of the opponent, the exact location of the shot, the game state - so it’s very tricky.”
Geoff Hurst, talking of his England teammate Jimmy Greaves, once likened the scoring superpower to the undefinable magic of Hollywood stardom.
“You can’t coach that, you can’t teach it, and it happens in other fields – actresses etcetera, all walks of life.”
So, we are left with all these leading men, marauding around the stages of the Premier League, fluffing lines and incapable of kicking the ball into the goal.
Darwin Núñez, a €100m striker, employed as an agent of chaos, a pinball machine swung around on the end of a wrecking ball crane. Rasmus Hojlund, an €80m striker, spraying chances everywhere and described by Gary Neville as ‘not a finisher’. Chelsea must be paying hundreds of mil per goal. And a cast of Arsenal forwards encounter nose bleeds, rashes and every other class of allergy when the ball is in the mixer.
And while Arteta, we can be fairly sure, has tried to micromanage this one too, it seems the gaffers, with all their philosophies and masterplans and projects around every other aspect of the game, are largely powerless.
They will attempt to plot an intricate route out of their six-yard box via tiki-taka navigation, they will divide pitches up into zones to create passing lanes and set pressing traps. But in this one area, they must wait for the mysteries of instinct to take hold. In an industry obsessed with controlling the controllables, they seem to have abdicated responsibility. They are openly courting Lady Luck.
Perhaps accordingly, there is even a touch of disrespect out there for the practice of goalscoring. These enigmatic creatures are sometimes even described as “just a goalscorer”, dismissed as freakshows not much use for anything other than the most important thing. Is it any wonder there seems to be a global neglect of finishing, when proficiency in the box might see you pigeonholed as a luxury, a dilettante, not really a fully-functioning footballer?
Even Pep occasionally fails to conceal a certain contempt for big Erling’s habit of conceding possession by kicking the ball into the goal.
Some, in fairness, have tried to figure this whole thing out. Kevin Phillips, a Premier League Golden Boot winner — just a goalscorer in many eyes — has attempted to pass on his knacks when coaching at various clubs, with mixed results, as he admits.
“You can drill players in making the right kind of runs, running along the line, staying onside, timing runs and trying to get in the right areas. But I often found myself in positions and didn’t really know how I got there. I just ended up there. I think that’s something you’re born with.”
Kev has since given up the ghost and taken up easier work managing entire football teams.
Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins runs around too much to be described as just a goalscorer — and probably doesn’t score quite enough — but he has a personal goalscoring coach, Scott Chickelday, who told Sky Sports he’s baffled clubs don’t focus more on the craft.
“It is strange that players come to work with me on finishing when they are in elite environments. I know managers work on formations and phases of play. Maybe they just do not get the time. I don't know.”
Harry Kane supposedly polished up his born knack by using only his left foot in training for three months at Tottenham. But Chickelday can also see why players may not want to alert the gaffer to flaws in their game.
"Some players just want to do an hour solid on their weaker foot. Maybe they don't want to take that to their manager because maybe they think they are getting away with it up to now and they don't want to be too open with a weakness.”
How the Arsenal could do now with their greatest goalscorer, Thierry Henry. But as his biographer Philippe Auclair admits, Henry was not regarded as being born with the knack. He admired teammates like Trezeguet and predecessors like Papin, “owner of skills that Thierry knew he could try to learn, but would never master to the same supreme degree, when intelligence becomes indistinguishable from instinct”.
This week Henry spoke of the anxiety, even depression, he hid during his playing career. His knack was unlocked when Arsene Wenger made little attempt to control his movements and more or less set him free.
Wenger once recalled: “At first, he was perhaps a little clumsy in his finishing and unsure of himself. He needed to be taught to believe in himself, to find a way around his shyness, his nervousness, his fears, while at the same time knowing that his constant doubts also helped him to progress and be stronger. He was very quick at analysing everything that was going on and how he needed to react. This intelligence, this capacity to evaluate, understand and question oneself, is also the mark of great players.”
Wenger had at least thought about the goalscorer and his art, but admitted too that he never entirely solved the mystery of a goal drought. “It goes in cycles. Finishing qualities come and go and you do not always know why.”
