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Do we have our best seasons without our best strikers?

LondonBristolian

By LondonBristolian
in Football Chat

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LondonBristolian

LondonBristolian

Posted
Posted

Sorry for yet another striker-related thread but an interesting point occurred to me.  I became a fan in 1990 (the tail end of the days of Turner & Taylor) but was really old enough to understand football from about 1992.  In that time we've had some quality strikers - e.g. Andy Cole, Shaun Goater, Akinbiyi, Maynard (despite his unpopularity now), Baldock and of course Kodjia.  And we've had some great seasons.  However our best two seasons in recent memory (07/08) and (14/15) were ones where we arguably lacked a great out-and-out goalscorer.  Even our promotion in 06/07 was achieved with 3 decent  strikers rather than a great one.

 

Don't get me wrong - I wish we'd signed a striker yesterday.  But I'm not sure a quality striker is as important to our success as people think. Clearly we now do need Abraham to keep us the good work and Gustav to settle and the rest of the team to come up with more goals.  But I wonder if sometimes (as I think happened with Adomah at the end of his time with us) we can become over-reliant on outstanding individuals to the point where it affects our play and I wonder if the fact we can't rely on anyone individual to get us out of trouble might actually be a strength as well as a weakness

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ashton_fan

ashton_fan

Posted
Posted
6 minutes ago, LondonBristolian said:

Sorry for yet another striker-related thread but an interesting point occurred to me.  I became a fan in 1990 (the tail end of the days of Turner & Taylor) but was really old enough to understand football from about 1992.  In that time we've had some quality strikers - e.g. Andy Cole, Shaun Goater, Akinbiyi, Maynard (despite his unpopularity now), Baldock and of course Kodjia.  And we've had some great seasons.  However our best two seasons in recent memory (07/08) and (14/15) were ones where we arguably lacked a great out-and-out goalscorer.  Even our promotion in 06/07 was achieved with 3 decent  strikers rather than a great one.

 

Don't get me wrong - I wish we'd signed a striker yesterday.  But I'm not sure a quality striker is as important to our success as people think. Clearly we now do need Abraham to keep us the good work and Gustav to settle and the rest of the team to come up with more goals.  But I wonder if sometimes (as I think happened with Adomah at the end of his time with us) we can become over-reliant on outstanding individuals to the point where it affects our play and I wonder if the fact we can't rely on anyone individual to get us out of trouble might actually be a strength as well as a weakness

I think the key for success for us is to play as a team. It's all very well having star players but if they don't fit in they can upset the team. The GJ team of 06/07 and 07/08 played as a unit with everyone pulling in the same direction, that's more important than having a star striker, it's better to get a few goals from most players than many from one, more difficult for the opposition to stop.

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Kingswoodactor

Kingswoodactor

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Genuinely believe that Tammy will get around 15 goals this season. 

He's always in the right place at the right time, especially in the 6 yard box. 

Obviously been coached well, but that natural instinctive ability to react in the way he does, is just something you cannot teach. 

Tomlin also more than capable of hitting 10 plus.

25 goals between those two, as well as 4-6 goals each from the likes of Bryan, Paterson, Reid, Flint; should be enough to have us flirting around the play-offs come the end of the season. 

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Nomad

Nomad

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46 minutes ago, Kingswoodactor said:

Genuinely believe that Tammy will get around 15 goals this season. 

He's always in the right place at the right time, especially in the 6 yard box. 

Obviously been coached well, but that natural instinctive ability to react in the way he does, is just something you cannot teach. 

Tomlin also more than capable of hitting 10 plus.

25 goals between those two, as well as 4-6 goals each from the likes of Bryan, Paterson, Reid, Flint; should be enough to have us flirting around the play-offs come the end of the season. 

In my opinion there is no pressure on Tammy to hit any numbers in his first season in "proper" football. However I think he would be very disappointed with only 15 goals this season - I'm sure he's looking for a minimum of 20. Sure, he'll have a barren run or two but I think he'll hit the 20+.

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Curr Avon

Curr Avon

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, ashton_fan said:

I think the key for success for us is to play as a team. It's all very well having star players but if they don't fit in they can upset the team. The GJ team of 06/07 and 07/08 played as a unit with everyone pulling in the same direction, that's more important than having a star striker, it's better to get a few goals from most players than many from one, more difficult for the opposition to stop.

Darren Byfield was top scorer with 8 goals in 07/08, mostly as sub, in a paltry league total of 53.

You're absolutely right about the unit and I think Saturday's result demonstrated how effective we can be with better movement from midfield. Bryan's goal was a wonderful example of flowing football and a commitment to get ahead of the ball and Freeman too carved an excellent opening. Both players benefitted from sharp work from Tammy and that type of link play could see us score an abundance of goals this season.

 

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Kingswoodactor

Kingswoodactor

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Posted
39 minutes ago, Nomad said:

In my opinion there is no pressure on Tammy to hit any numbers in his first season in "proper" football. However I think he would be very disappointed with only 15 goals this season - I'm sure he's looking for a minimum of 20. Sure, he'll have a barren run or two but I think he'll hit the 20+.

I think he can hit 20 too, just didn't want to get shot down by the negative crew on here. :thumbsup:

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JamesBCFC

JamesBCFC

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Posted
1 hour ago, Kingswoodactor said:

Genuinely believe that Tammy will get around 15 goals this season. 

He's always in the right place at the right time, especially in the 6 yard box. 

Obviously been coached well, but that natural instinctive ability to react in the way he does, is just something you cannot teach. 

Tomlin also more than capable of hitting 10 plus.

25 goals between those two, as well as 4-6 goals each from the likes of Bryan, Paterson, Reid, Flint; should be enough to have us flirting around the play-offs come the end of the season. 

tammy is already at 5!

I was wondering, his current goal/game ration (5 in 7 all competitions) would put him on 32.85 (lets round it to 33) after 46 games. As a general question to the forum, if you were England manager and an 18 y/o scored 33 in a season at championship level, would you call him up?

I certainly would call him up for the squad if the next games were qualifiers and give him time off the bench, but if it was a friendly I'd give him a start but tell him there's no pressure on him, he has earned his spot through his form.

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Kingswoodactor

Kingswoodactor

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, JamesBCFC said:

tammy is already at 5!

I was wondering, his current goal/game ration (5 in 7 all competitions) would put him on 32.85 (lets round it to 33) after 46 games. As a general question to the forum, if you were England manager and an 18 y/o scored 33 in a season at championship level, would you call him up?

I certainly would call him up for the squad if the next games were qualifiers and give him time off the bench, but if it was a friendly I'd give him a start but tell him there's no pressure on him, he has earned his spot through his form.

There will more than likely be a point this season when Tammy doesn't score for 5-6 games. 

If he kept up his current ratio of goals per game, he'd be a 50 million pound player come May. 

15-20 league goals in the most competitive 2nd tier there's ever been in English football, as an 18 year old, would still be effing amazing. 

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JamesBCFC

JamesBCFC

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Just now, Kingswoodactor said:

There will more than likely be a point this season when Tammy doesn't score for 5-6 games. 

If he kept up his current ratio of goals per game, he'd be a 50 million pound player come May. 

15-20 league goals in the most competitive 2nd tier there's ever been in English football, as an 18 year old, would still be effing amazing. 

of course, I don't for a second expect he will end on 33 goals. I could see him reaching 20 though provided he doesn't pick up an injury that sidelines him for a while. perhaps 25 in all competitions if we go on a cup run (I say this well aware we are on one of our best league cup runs in my lifetime after just 2 wins)

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Red Skin

Red Skin

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@LondonBristolian Interesting observation.

I think the movement and fluidity of our midfield will be telling this year and expect goals to spread around the team or more correctly the whole squad.  That is as long as LJ can communicate his ideas - I think we have intelligent players that are keen to learn so I'm hopeful.  

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Negan

Negan

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Wilbs got 21 goals in the promotion season and Agard had 14. Matt Smith also scored plenty. So don't think we can class that as a season where our strikers didn't do well. However I see what you're saying. Hopefully Tammy can get 18+ and Tomlin somewhere around 10. Will be interesting to see how Engvall does though. When you look at our 3 strikers he's the only one that will be here next season, so hopefully he can get to double figures which will do him and us the world of good for next year. 

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Bat Fastard

Bat Fastard

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The problem with people like JET is that his lack of obvious work rate off the ball, often led to our defence coming under more pressure than they would have desired.  It really is a team game and we need to defend from the front - especially as we will need to press the opposition hard in order to limit the scope of their talented players.  If we have the ability to score many different types of goals, that come from the team as a whole, then we will be dangerous in front of their goal and strong when defending our own.  BUT we do have dangerous goal scores in Tammy and probably Gustav - ably backed up by half a dozen others, who could each contribute more than half a dozen in a season.  To make matters even more interesting, these players are, in many cases, very young - with plenty of scope for improvement.  Once they gel as a team, I would expect us to be very decent in this league - one or two more star signings, and we should be good candidates for promotion.  Lee and MA have done a stunning job in this window - lets hope that there is much more to come.  The future is bright - the future is red and white!!

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Jack Dawe

Jack Dawe

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Interesting stuff from the OP.

The year Maynard scored 20 league goals (09/10), the team scored 56. In two of the 3 Championship seasons we managed after 09/10, without Maynard (or, without him scoring at that rate again and then after he left), we scored more - 59 in 12/13 when we were relegated, and 62 in 10/11.

In 2013/14 we had the third highest scoring strike duo in the country (Baldock/JET), did away with them the following season and scored 99 League goals! 

It's not Kodj's goals we're missing, it's Flint's.....

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cityexile

cityexile

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9 hours ago, Welcome To The Jungle said:

Strikers Win Matches

Defences Win Titles

Some truth in this, although there is part of me wonders what would have happened if we had both at the same time! The team that got to the play offs v Hull with Kodjia all season may not have needed the play offs.

I think Kodjia's scoring in the first half of last season may have been a little inflated by our gung ho approach. We created lots, but shipped a fair few too.

5 games is to small a sample, but after this many games last season we had scored 6, compared to 7 now, but conceded 10 compared to 5 now (6th game was a 2-4 as well). Gd +2 compared to -4. 

Conceeding 5 less goals is every bit as valuable as having had another super striker that had scored a goal a game. Less exciting sure, but as effective.

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Lanterne Rouge

Lanterne Rouge

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4 minutes ago, cityexile said:

Some truth in this, although there is part of me wonders what would have happened if we had both at the same time! The team that got to the play offs v Hull with Kodjia all season may not have needed the play offs.

I think Kodjia's scoring in the first half of last season may have been a little inflated by our gung ho approach. We created lots, but shipped a fair few too.

5 games is to small a sample, but after this many games last season we had scored 6, compared to 7 now, but conceded 10 compared to 5 now (6th game was a 2-4 as well). Gd +2 compared to -4. 

Conceeding 5 less goals is every bit as valuable as having had another super striker that had scored a goal a game. Less exciting sure, but as effective.

If it`s Flinty throwing his body on the line to stop a certain goal as on Saturday that can be just as exciting as scoring a goal.

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