What Has Happened To The English Strikers?

England’s World Cup squad was announced this week, and whilst it certainly wasn’t a World Cup winning squad, it was still a squad which excited me. Firstly, Roy Hodgson is the first England manager for a long time to realise that 7 defenders is plenty and having a centre back cover right back opens up another spot for an attacking player who could potentially come off the bench to win a game for us. Secondly, there were the young players. It was refreshing to see an England manager not just going with the tried and tested but giving up and coming players a chance.

I was also excited by what Ross Barkley, Raheem Sterling and Luke Shaw represent. Along with the likes of Jack Wilshere and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, England finally seems to be producing technical accomplished players more regularly. And yet each of these players still plays like an English player. As much as I admire the Spanish way of playing football, if England try to play them at their own game, they will never win. But what England can be the best at is playing in an English style, and if that can be retained whilst improving the technical quality of our players, the future could be promising. There is a long way to go, but it does at least look like English football is on the right track.

The one area of worry going forward though is the striker position. The most recent reliable English Premier League goalscorer to emerge was Wayne Rooney, who is now 28 and has amassed 270 career goals. Daniel Sturridge enjoyed a good season, but previously his best return was 13 goals. Will he just be a one hit wonder?  Sturridge is hardly an emerging talent either – he will be 25 in September. Where are the 18 to 22 year olds achieving 15+ goal seasons?

The dearth of English strikers is something of a surprise given our recent past. I grew up in the 1990s, where at the start of each league season there were at least 10 English players with a realistic chance of scoring 15+ league goals. During the first 10 Premier League seasons, 7 different Englishmen won the Premier League golden boot. Since then, no Englishman has won. This season, just 5 Englishmen reached double figures, and the highest scoring ‘young’ player was Raheem Sterling with 9.

Hopefully this will be a blip and not something symptomatic of a bigger problem. But I worry that in the quest for better all-round players, we could be starting to forget that the most important skill in football, and the most valuable one, is being able to score a goal.