Old school number 9s will be back in fashion when managers put winning ahead of reputations – but Haaland isn’t one
AS SOMEBODY who was proud to call himself a genuine old-school No9, I’m supposed to be part of a dying breed.
And I can understand why people might think that. There is a lack of authentic centre-forwards in the Premier League and across the whole of elite football.
The days when top-flight clubs were employing players like myself, Rickie Lambert at Southampton and Grant Holt at Norwich appear to be numbered.
But those sorts of players will come back into fashion before long.
For me, the blame for the current trend lies with coaches at all levels — from the Premier League, to academies and right down to those coaching kids at the grass roots on a Sunday morning.
For an increasing number of head coaches in the top flight, it all seems to be about their own reputations, rather than winning matches and bringing success to their clubs.
The perfect case in point is Vincent Kompany.
A great bloke, an outstanding defender and captain at Manchester City but, as manager of Burnley last season, a coach who oversaw one of the most defensively naive teams I’ve ever watched.
And yet where did Kompany end up this summer? At Bayern Munich — one of the biggest clubs in the world – with one of the few last remaining great centre-forwards in Harry Kane.
It was a good career move for Kompany but not so good for Burnley, who were widely tipped to stay up last season but never looked in with a shout of beating the drop once the season had started.
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Everybody wants to coach like Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola.
Everyone is obsessed with technical players and keeping possession, which when you have the best players is brilliant to watch and can be very successful.
But if you have more limited players, you need greater physicality. You need a centre-forward who can score goals, link up play and cause different problems for defences.
The early signs are that Southampton are going to be this season’s Burnley. Newly-promoted, obsessed with playing out from the back and getting beaten consistently.
Who knows, maybe their boss Russell Martin will lead Saints to relegation and turn up at the Nou Camp in charge of Barcelona next season.
But at some point owners of clubs outside of the Premier League elite will realise that their best hope of success is to play a different brand of football rather than being seduced by coaches who want to be Pep Lite.
Since the advent of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi — two of the greatest scorers the game has ever known but neither of them emerging as centre-forwards — young players have wanted to be wingers or inside forwards or No 10s.
In England a couple of decades ago, we had Alan Shearer, Andy Cole, Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Ian Wright, Kevin Phillips — all quality goalscorers.
Now there is no obvious successor to 31- year-old Kane as England No9.
Ollie Watkins, only a few years younger than Kane at 28, is a fine player but has spent a lot of his career as more of a winger than a genuine centre-forward.
Erling Haaland is actually not what I’d call an old-school No9. The big Norwegian admits himself that he is not outstanding with his back to goal.
But the 24-year-old City striker is just about the most incredible goalscoring machine I’ve ever seen.
Having scored back-to-back hat-tricks, he netted twice in the first-half against Brentford last weekend and looked absolutely gutted not to get a third.
And I love that about him. It’s all about that hunger, some might say greed, for scoring goals. You don’t get as many players with that attitude now.
The lack of proper centre-forwards in their late teens and early 20s is noticeable and if you watched any Premier League 2 ‘reserve’ football as well as Under-18 and lower age-group level football you would understand why.
It is a soft game at those levels, refereed very differently to senior football.
There is no room for physicality as refs blow up for fouls at the slightest contact and plenty of players get a real shock when they step up to the men’s game.
You see a lot of goals awarded after a player has lost possession and then stops, thinking he’s going to receive a soft free-kick — then he doesn’t.
As for young kids learning the game, there have been a lot of great strides made compared to the days when eight-year-olds were playing 11 v 11 with full-sized goals, which was no good for anyone.
But perhaps we’ve gone too far the other way. As a youngster, I’d be encouraged to play against kids a year or two older to increase my physicality but that doesn’t really happen these days.
There have always been trends and cycles in football and there always will be – which is why I don’t accept that us centre-forwards will go the way of the dinosaurs.