Slim wrote:Piccsnumberoneblue wrote:Dubciteh wrote:His performance yesterday was as bad as I have seen from any striker we have had. Where is his wonderful touch gone? Worse thing about the injury with his shoulder is it was totally avoidable, we were 98nil up in a cup game with only a few minutes to go, sickening.
Everybody talks of his shoulder injury as the turning point,
but he was already playing poorly by then. Perhaps he has just been worked out. It often happens once Prem defences have seen you a few times.
04 Jan Blackburn 1 goal.
08 Jan West Hame 3 goals.
12 Jan Newcastle 1 goal.
15 Jan Blackburn 2 goals.
18 Jan Cardiff 0 goals.
21 Jan West Hame 2 goals. <----Injury.
9 goals in 6 games...my god he was poor.
This illustrates perfectly how poor a point was being made, I guess he had a lucky January!!!
The observations about our strikers lack of goals in recent weeks however does appear to highlight where we are currently faltering. In our last 7 matches we have amassed just 7 goals of which just one was scored by a recognised striker - Jovetic v Chelsea. The rest are shared across our midfield
Yaya x 2
Nasri x 3
Navas x 1
So demechilies is the villan of the piece, in reality he is probably making no more mistakes than he 'normally does' but the consequences of his mistakes are being mangnified x 10 as a result of the fact that the goals have suddenly dried up. It's really strange as it's not been a gradual thing, you can literally draw a line in understanding when it happened - the 29th January to be precise.
Why? Well we can look at Aguero picking up his injury at White Hart Lane. Dzeko like Aguero, scored in that game, but missed a hatful of chances. He had carried an ankle injury since scoring in the game against Blackburn in the 15th Jan, whilst Negredo dried up following his brace against WHU in the league cup semi when he picked up that shoulder injury.
So injury has played a part - Jovetic's brief flirtation with full fitness saw the return of 1 goal against Chelsea but eventually culminated in a return to the treatment room after a short spell in the home game with Stoke.
But is injury the sole reason for our strikers baron spell? There are some parallels with our title winning season. We were on fire in the first half of that season having caught teams by surprise with our offensive approach to games - having been so defensively minded in the previous season. Pellegrinis 'two up top' policy caught teams by surprise in the first half of this season, but now we are playing these teams for a second time they've seemingly worked out how best to negate our threat - Wigan is the latest and perfect example of this.
So whats the answer, how do our strikers get their mojo back? In our title winning season when all seemed lost we suddenly just went for it (and got a committed Carlos Tevez firing on all cylinders) . This season our Argentinian equivalent is Sergio Aguero, he is the catalyst, keep him fit and he'll start banging a few in and the others will follow his example. That and start giving yaya the 'right to roam' and give teams something different to figure out.