£60m for Calvert-Lewin? I like him but it shows we have the worst pool of forwards in a generation
YOU know there’s a paucity of strikers on planet Earth when a decent-but-hardly-prolific Dominic Calvert-Lewin is being touted as a £60million buy for Arsenal and West Ham.
Alan Shearer, Ian Wright, Les Ferdinand, Michael Owen, Andy Cole, Robbie Fowler, Teddy Sheringham and me all played in an era in which strikers had to score 25 goals in a season just to get into an England squad, never mind to be touted for a big-money move.
You can be a £60m striker with a goalscoring record of one in four if a club thinks you could help them get into Europe. And I’m not knocking Calvert-Lewin but, in a sane market, the lad’s worth £15m at best.
I look at the Premier League these days and see the worst pool of centre-forwards we’ve had for a generation.
Harry Kane and Romelu Lukaku (right) are the Premier League’s poster boys for the central-striking role but they’ve managed just five goals each in the first five months of the season. Both have been affected by moves and failed moves in the summer, and if you take Kane in particular, look how much a little speculation and not getting what he wanted has knocked him out of his stride.
He and Lukaku have taken their eyes off the ball in a way that Shearer, who also had speculation to deal with during his career, never did. I’ve said before – and been coated for it by Tottenham fans – that Kane doesn’t have the X-factor but surely people see now what I was getting at.
If you were to look back at the top goalscorers’ lists from the early 90s, there was an abundance of English talent mixed in with names such as Jurgen Klinsmann and Eric Cantona, top-flight legends, both.
But if you look at the top 25 scorers right now, there’s barely an English striker among them… and the top one, Jamie Vardy, no longer wants to play international football. The advent of goalscoring wide men has obviously contributed greatly to the dearth of strikers. Years ago, Mo Salah and Sadio Mane, for example, would have played to the right or left of the front two and been encouraged to go outside their full-backs to put crosses into the box, which would have lessened their goal output.
But now they’re expected to come inside and dovetail with the bloke through the middle, scoring as many, if not more, goals.
At Manchester City, they’ve even got Jack Grealish playing the false nine role. Such a mercurial playmaker should never be receiving the ball with his back to goal.
We’re producing several players in all positions apart from one and, glaringly, that’s striker.