No easy answers why SA strikers fire blanks week in and week out
The picture is one of inefficiency, and a lack of quality, characterised by fewer total shots a match Solution is tricky to find. If a coach could pick a player who guarantees him a goal a match, he’d have done so long ago
THE 2014/2015 PSL season kicks off this weekend, but an analysis of the goal-scoring trends suggest a serious lack of prolific strikers.
This problem, already apparent at the national level for some time, appears to be systemic in the top-flight league.
In the 2013/2014 PSL season, the leading goal-scorer was Bernard Parker with 10 goals from 27 matches.
A handful of players behind him scored between six and eight goals, all from about 20 matches. That equates to one goal every three matches for the best PSL strikers.
Luis Suarez, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi scored 33, 30 and 29 goals during their respective league campaigns, from around 30 matches — one goal a match. Even strikers in the next tier down would expect to score once every two matches — this is the mark of an effective striker, but is a standard PSL players have not achieved.
Numbers can be misleading, and they often tell only part of the story. For example, fewer goals could be the result of either excellent defending, or possibly the outcome of ineffective build-up play that does not afford goalscorers opportunities to score.
Exploring these possibilities to find constructive insights requires further exploration and some statistics, which I partly obtained from Tiro van Rooyen, a specialist football analyst with ProZone Sports, and by analysing the stats from the top leagues in Europe.
What these stats show is that PSL strikers take fewer shots a match than their European counterparts — 2.6 shots a striker a match compared to four a striker in Europe.
This suggests that our goalscoring drought is at least in part the result of simply not creating opportunities, and the inability to “pull the trigger” in front of goal.
There’s more to it though, because there are also stats on the accuracy of shots, and they show that our shooting skills let us down compared to international standards.
Only one of those 2.6 shots a player amatch (on average) are actually on target — that’s 40%, compared to a standard of between 50% and 55% for the best in the world.
The result of these clinical “inefficiencies” is that in the PSL, the top strikers will score a goal once every eight shots. In Europe, it’s one goal for every five shots. In other words, for every 100 shots attempted by strikers in a season, you can expect to see 12 goals in the PSL, and 20 in the top European leagues. The picture is one of inefficiency, and a lack of qual- ity, characterised by fewer total shots a match, worse shot accuracy, and reduced conversion of shots into goals.
Finding a solution is unfortunately trickier than identifying the problem — it’s obvious when goal-scoring chances are being wasted.
If a coach could pick a player who guarantees him a goal a match, he’d have done so long ago!
The fact that the coach can’t do this suggests that somewhere along the way we fail to develop the physical and technical attributes required to score goals — speed, acceleration, ball skills, strength, size, spatial awareness and composure. Perhaps young players find it too easy to score goals because the levels below professional are too “soft”, meaning that we have inadvertently developed a system where technical abilities stagnate because there is no pressure on players to evolve.
I feel the solution likely lies in the formative stages, when players are between 15 and 18 years, in the pathway that carries talented players to professional stardom. For all PSL coaches, and Shakes Mashaba, it’s a current problem with a longer-term future solution than they may like.