Top quality goalscorers, who will more or less guarantee you goals even with an average service, are extremely expensive and beyond our means. The last one we had was Bent.
If we involved in a relegation or promotion battle it might be worth hiring someone like Kevin Phillips, but for us building for the forthcoming season is more important than whether we finish 7th or 21st this season, so we don't need to pay high wages for someone to come on for the last 25 minutes and who might hang up his boots at the end of this season.
Looking at the next level of goalscorers, those who would normally put away (say) 20% of good chances, we have four, Kermorgant, Fuller, Haynes and BWP. And we only have those because there are, or were, big questions over their health and fitness which deterred richer clubs from signing them.
Of our young strikers, Sho-Silva looks the most likely to make the grade but must be at least two years away from holding down a first-team place.
So I reckon our best hope is to borrow someone from a bigger club who is not getting many games, like Schlupp, Ecclestone or Waghorn. (Not them specifically, just examples of what might be available). But I am not sure whether we have the money even to borrow these better levels of player.
But the reason our present strikers don't get enough goals is the lack of creativity in midfield. And the reason for that is our lack of defensive ability in central midfield since Hollands dropped out of the picture for whatever reason. What we lack in quality there we have to make up in numbers, with Wilson, Stephens, Pritchard and Jackson all spending a disproportionate amount of time in our own half chasing and harrying, whereas Hollands or Andy Hughes would have killed an attack with one well-timed and strong tackle.
So if you want to score more goals, acquire a decent defensive central midfielder. Sounds odd, I know, but I believe that is the key. If our other midfielders could then create 10 goalscoring chances a game, our present strikers will put away a couple on average, and that is more than good enough to get promoted.
It is a lot cheaper in the transfer market and in wages to improve your defence to let in 10 fewer goals a season than it is to improve your attack to score 10 more but the end result is the same.
Lastly, goalscoring is not the be all and end all. Hull City are second in the table and have only scored two more goals than us. Obviously Steven Bruce knows how to organize a defence. At one time I thought our back five would be equally sound, but Wiggins got injured, Hollands went awol, and Hamer drops the occasional clanger. If we can tweak the defence just a tad, we might do a Hull and rack up the points even though scoring relatively few goals.
