Agreed mark. Especially on Hooper. Some of his touches were brilliant. Just about the only refreshing thing to take from the game.
Don't forget to add in Osvaldo. The main difference with Torres was that he had bags of Premier League experience before his transfer to Chelsea. Also - Benteke, Michu and Jelavic who are all finding it much harder to find the back of the net this season!!
rvw is not a unique case. it does make me wonder how many fans thought we'd signed the 'finished article'. if they did, i assume this must have been down to the fee, but it is clear that he is still far from the finished article and will require time to improve but as mentioned earlier, will need time to adapt to the league too. his injury really hasn't helped and neither has the overall performance of the team but his biggest issue has been lack of clear cut chances. he's had maybe five clear cut chances all season. he's scored one (if you could even call that particular chance clear cut), a few keepers have made some excellent saves and he's had a couple of tricky scuffed efforts, such as the one against hull the other day where he was off balance. we might not see the best of him here, but he's definitely a classy striker and should not be labelled a dud at all. i personally would take him out of the firing line for a little while and get back to one up top as it's our most solid and expansive system. bring him on as an impact sub, pitt him against tired defences, see if he can get a clear chance and get a goal. you can physically see his head drop because he just isn't used to such pitiful service. it's a tough gig to play up front for norwich in the premier league, as it is for a lot of the teams in the bottom half of the league. chances are at a premium and if you're low on confidence, as ricky blatantly is, you're going to snatch at them. he reminds me of torres a bit - i think that's a decent comparison. and he's a fantastic player, but even in a top team he sometimes struggles to get the breaks. its been a disappointing start for him but he's far from a write-off as yet.
Put it into context, how many strikers under Hughton have found the net regularly? Holt, Hoolahan, Wolfswinkel, Elmander, Becchio, none of them have been regular. Hooper has done exceptionally well to get 1 in 3. Wolfswinkel however is not going to score until the service is different and more precise.
Holt was prolific before the change of management and at mid 20`s Wolfsw**kel is hardly a spent force, he will score a lot of goals during his career but is lacking in form and confidence .
Since when has Hoolahan been a striker? He was hardly prolific in the premiership under Lambert, Becchio just isn't good enough for this standard and Holt couldn't score this season in the championship.
The point is Munky, how many of the strikers under Hughton have regularly found the net? Not, how many have been scored under Lambert in comparison to Hughton. The context is stating the difficulty in scoring goals under Hughtons system.
Whilst I agree Hughton's system, particularly the 4-4-2, isn't creating enough chances, might it also be to do with the difficulty for strikers in lower league teams to score at all? How many teams close to us have a striker who has 10 goals to his name? The only team in the bottom half who seem to create a decent number of chances is Hull, for everyone else that's the struggle.
Perhaps, with the possible exception of Hooper, they just aren't good enough at this level? They certainly don't get in the box, find space and get into goal scoring positions enough if you ask me, something that doesn't really get mentioned much in the debate about why we don't score enough goals. I'm hoping it's just a confidence thing with Ricky and that as soon as he gets one he'll get some form going, just saying I've not been particularly impressed thus far.. And anyway, Andy Carroll used to bang them in for fun under Hootun's previous systems, as did Kevin Nolan and Peter Lovenkrands
Looking at the bottom 8 teams, they have scored a grand total of 187 goals - WBA have 27 goals, with 5 teams on 22 goals. With the exception of Hull's 6-0 demolition of Fulham, most of the victories have been 1-0, so goals are at a premium for all teams around us. Chelsea had 39 shots on goal and only 9 on target against Wet Sham last night, so even with the total cost of their team, they couldn't break down a packed defence. At the other end of the table, Citeh have 68 goals in the league and a massive total of 115 in all competitions.
I think you could add RvW's excellent header that brushed Pilks on the way into the net, and so wasn't credited to him. RvW will come good.
The balance of the team is incorrect though which means even playing a flat 4-4-2, which is in my opinion is an outdated and easy to play against formation we are not creating much at all and we are loosing midfield completely. I will start to form an opinion on RvW and Co when the team around them is right and I think it's unfair to judge our strikers with our current issues in the creative department. It's so easy to stop us it's unreal, you stop our wide players and we have had it. We do not have the players to go narrow, we keep loosing the ball all the time! RvW is a tricky through the middle player who is good at creating space. What's the point though if you are almost always ignored and the ball goes wide to early? It's the balance of the team and the players in the middle that are wrong not the strikers.
Yep, and of top scorers in the Premier League from teams in the bottom half we have: Joint 15th - Wilfried Bony - 7 Joint 19th - Adam Johnson - 6 (both of whom have only recently scored a handful And then Hooper in joint 26th, along with the likes of Sidwell, Carlton Cole, Charlie Adam and Frazier Campbell. So up until the beginning of January, Hooper was the bottom half of the league's top scorer!
