Goals are at a premium at Manchester City Football Club at the moment; in fact it has been that way for a long time – far too long!
Off the top of my head I can’t remember our last 20+ goal a season striker, but i’m sure one of you footy anoraks will tell me.
Having seemingly lost the ability to find the back of the net on a regular basis with our expensive foreign ‘strikers’ who you wouldn’t put money on to hit a barn door at ten paces at the moment, I’m beginning now to wonder whether we should have held on to Bradley Wright-Phillips for another season or two?
The consensus of opinion at the time, myself included, was that he probably wouldn’t be able to cut it at the top level, i.e the Premiership, and that we probably got a reasonable deal when selling him to Southampton in the summer transfer window.
However, having seen him flourish and score some classy goals at for the Saints, I’m beginning to feel that he may be another talent that’s slipped through the net, and the decision to let him go will come back and haunt us.
With the benefit of hindsight, City probably didn’t give him a real chance of establishing himself in the 1st team. Both KK and Psycho seemed uncomfortable to play him and more often than not he’d come on around the 85th minute during games when City had been playing really badly – i.e the majority of our games. He did have a run of 3 or 4 games at the tail end of last season, but City were playing so poorly during that period that he really didn’t get any sort of service and looked quite a forlorn figure up front on his own.
Samaras and Corradi clearly haven’t settled well within the City team and both look badly lacking in confidence in front of goal. It doesn’t help when they are clearly played out of position, but are either of the £6m and £2m respectively better than BWP? On the evidence so far, they probably are not, although I’m hoping they’ll prove me wrong.
Just think, we could have signed Dean Ashton for £3m when he went to Norwich. I know he’s out injured now, but to me, he is the sort of striker City have been crying out for since the days of Rosler and Quinn.
I guess for now, we’ll just have to enviously keep watching BWP banging them in for Southampton, whilst our strikers continue to fire blanks…… or maybe after the ‘Boro game, our fortunes may be on the up?
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