Wood among Premier League elite
If you don’t believe All Whites striker Chris Wood is one of New Zealand’s greatest current sportsmen, open the other eye and take a peek at the English Premier League top scorers aggregate table.
The website has reeled off the arcane fact that Wood is now among just 13 players to score 30 or more goals in the last three seasons. The 28-year-old – who left Hamilton as a schoolboy to chase his football dream – is in exalted company.
His opening goal – a stylish leftfooted shot – in Burnley’s 1-0 win against Manchester United on Thursday was his 10th of the term – the third season on the bounce that he has reached double figures in world football’s pinnacle domestic league.
And, adding a dollop of drama, his last two goals have come since breaking his nose in a January 11 clash with Chelsea.
Wood’s scoring feats won’t make a website home page in rugbyobsessed New Zealand, but they should do.
It beggars belief that New Zealand Football failed to nominate the sometime All Whites captain for the Halberg Awards this time out. His feats, week-in week-out surely match anything achieved by 2019 finalists Kane Williamson (cricket), Tom Walsh (athletics), Scott McLaughlin (motor racing) and Israel Adesanya (mixed martial arts) in a much bigger sport.
Wood’s goalscoring spree dwarfs anything achieved by Beauden Barrett, Kieran Read or Sonny Bill Williams in the last rugby season.
And, sorry Steven Adams fans, the NBA may be basketball’s pinnacle, but it still can’t hold a candle to the English Premier League for global profile, even if Adams is New Zealand sport’s top earner.
To put Wood’s achievements in perspective, only 12 other men have 30 or more EPL goals since the start of the 2017 season – and some of them are among the biggest names in world football.
The glittering list includes England captain Harry Kane and Sergio Aguero – the third leading scorer in Argentina’s football history. Liverpool trio Mohammed Salah (Egypt), Roberto Firmino (Brazil) and Sadio Mane (Senegal), have collectively bagged 142 goals over the last three years for the European and world champions, who are running away with EPL title.
Add Belgian Eden Hazard (late of Chelsea, now with Real Madrid), France frontrunner Alexandre Lacazette and England strikers Jamie Vardy (Leicester City) and Raheem Sterling (Manchester City) and Marcus Rashford (Manchester United), and it amounts to an impressive retinue.
Then, there’s Christopher Grant Wood from little old New Zealand – ranked 122nd on Fifa’s top nations table. He shares the 30-goal mark with classy Korean striker Son Heung-Min, Kane’s forward-line foil at Tottenham Hotspur, last
The top goalscorers in the English Premier League since the 2017-18 season.
65 – Mohamed Salah (Liverpool)
58 – Harry Kane (Tottenham), Sergio Aguero (Manchester City)
55 – Jamie Vardy (Leicester City) 46 Raheem Sterling (Manchester City), Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (Arsenal) 44 – Eden Hazard (Chelsea) *
43 – Sadio Mane (Liverpool)
34 – Roberto Firmino (Liverpool)
32 – Alexandre Lacazette (Arsenal)
31 – Marcus Rashford (Manchester United)
30–
Heung-Min (Tottenham)
* No longer playing in EPL. Now with Real Madrid
Son
year’s beaten European Champions League finalists.
Wood is the only player on the list from a club which has never played in the European Champions League.
He may have fewer than half the 65 goals scored by Salah, who is as revered in Egypt as any late pharaoh, but he doesn’t get as many chances.
Wood leads the line for unfashionable, 13th-placed Burnley, the smallest club (on a hometown population basis) in the Premier League. He does not benefit from the silver-platter service provided by the playmakers of Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal and Spurs, yet Wood has scored one more goal than the 29 managed by City’s Brazilian star Gabriel Jesus.
Little wonder Burnley’s manager Sean Dyche said after the Manchester United match that Wood’s double figure of goals for a third successive year was ‘‘a good marker. It not an easy task scoring goals in the Premier League, and he’s scored well again so far [with] more to come’’.
While the New Zealander may not be as skilful as some contemporaries on the goals chart, he and Burnley buddy Ashley Barnes (27 goals in three years) have forged one of the competition’s most physically imposing – and successful – frontline duos.
Wood leads the EPL charts for most headed goals since 2017-18 with 14, making the most of his 1.91m height.
No-one would yet make the claim that Wood has, or will, supplant Wynton Rufer as New Zealand’s greatest footballer. Rufer – the Oceania player of the century – was so good the great Franz Beckenbauer said he was the best striker in the Bundesliga in 1990, the year West Germany won the Fifa World Cup. ‘‘Kiwi’’ Rufer won four titles with Werder Bremen, including the Bundesliga and German cup crowns.
Wood – then a goalkeeper – was once part of Rufer’s Wynrs coaching school in Auckland, before switching to striker. His goalscoring return in the EPL now stands scrutiny with his old mentor’s in the German top flight. Rufer, a European Cup Winner’s Cup gold medallist in 1992, netted 59 goals in 174 games for Werder Bremen. Wood has struck 30 times in 84 league appearances for Burnley.
His 10 goals in 22 games in 2019-20 represent his best strike rate so far. Wood netted 10 times in 24 appearances in 2017-18 after inking a $26 million transfer from second-tier club Leeds United. An ever-present in 2018-19, the Kiwi scored 10 goals in 38 games.
There are still 14 games to go in the current season, so expect this term to be Wood’s most productive yet. At 28 – in his 12th senior season – he is very much in his playing prime.
Ryan Nelsen (Blackburn Rovers, Tottenham Hotspur and Queen’s Park Rangers) and Winston Reid (West Ham United) proved Kiwis could foot in the Premier League. But they were defenders, who made a handsome living from keeping the ball out of the net. Wood is banging in goals for fun, and fuelling the dreams of a new generation of Kiwis.
He’s also a living example that persistence pays off, patiently learning his trade during loan spells at lower league clubs before striking paydirt and the big-time at Burnley.