RHODES NEEDS TO GIVE MORE THAN GOALS
JORDAN Rhodes, who scored a hattrick for Sheffield Wednesday last weekend, has always been a natural goalscorer.
Unfortunately, that’s all he is. He puts the ball in the net and contributes little else. That is why he hasn’t reached the very top. If you’re going to employ him, you need other players to cover the jobs he won’t do. You need to provide him with service. It’s a very niche way of playing and nobody in the Premier League will countenance it. At the highest level, nobody wants a pure goalscorer any more. Look at how Dwight Gayle has struggled at Newcastle. A forward must be able to hold the ball up. He must be able to work hard out of possession, to link up with other players and defend. Even Sergio
Aguero, the Premier
League’s greatest scorer of the last ten years, has changed his game. He was more like a Rhodesy in his early days at Man City – a ‘get me on the end of it and
I’ll score all day long’ type player.
Since Pep arrived, he’s become a far more rounded player who does all sorts of jobs for the team. If you’re intelligent enough to change your game, you’ll make it. If you’re not, you won’t. A great example is Harry Kane, who struggled badly when he first went out on loan to the Championship. He didn’t score goals or look good.
He went back to Spurs, realised what he needed to do and became one of the world’s best strikers. Jordan has had many years and many opportunities to make those alterations but it hasn’t happened.