Quizzed on whether the lack of fearsome No.9s – as the likes of Kane, Robert Lewandowski, Karim Benzema and Luis Suarez reach the twilight of their respective careers – has become a global trend, former Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, Aston Villa and England striker Collymore, speaking in association with BetWright football bettingtold GOAL: “I think that in the last 15, 20 years, most teams play with the front three. I speak to a lot of coaches and they say, ‘nobody wants to be a striker because nobody wants the responsibility’.
“They all want to be wide forwards, so they get the skills, they get to cut in, they get to shoot, but they’re not judged on their output. If you’re a centre-forward/striker, you’re judged on one thing, and that’s goals.
“And to be fair to Erling Haaland, when he went to Manchester City, if you remember, particularly at Dortmund, there were loads of times when the ball would go over the top, he’d gallop on the end of it, he’d have 30, 40, 50 yards of green grass to run into, round the keeper or chip the keeper. At City, it was get in the box and tap it in. So the vast majority of his goals, Erling Haaland’s, have been tap-ins, but that’s not him as a player, he’s had the discipline to be able to do that.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the reversion from playing two central strikers with two wide men there to just service the striker rather than cut in and shoot every time, which drives me mad, is to blame.
“For example, when I was a young player, and I sometimes played wide, particularly when I started at Crystal Palace, if you cut in and didn’t score, you got the mother of all b*llockings, because it was like, ‘you’re not here to score, you’re here to put it on a plate for the two centre-forwards’.
“There’s only one centre-forward now, so the goal-scoring responsibilities have been shared out a little bit. But if you look around, the fact that Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Danny Welbeck were mooted to be potential back-up strikers (for England) if Ollie Watkins didn’t hit the form patch that he did at the end of the season, the fact that Liam Delap has had a really poor season, or really poor time so far at Chelsea, and you go to the under-21s and go to the 17s and the 18s, there are no strikers coming through.
“So it’s a worry, it’s a trend, and it’s a worry across global football. But trends are there for a reason. I hope that if we’re speaking again in five or 10 years’ time that teams will be playing some variation of 4-4-2 and two strikers up top occupying one or two defenders that don’t know how to defend against two because they’ve been so used to defending against one will come back into fashion, in the same way that teams putting the ball out for a throw-in – Paris Saint-Germain, the best team in Europe, stick the ball out like a rugby kick – and set-pieces that Arsenal have made their own this season come back into fashion.
“But it is a massive worry, and for somebody that was a central striker to see such a paucity of great strikers, whether it be in the Premier League or the World Cup, is desperately disappointing.”
