Strikers from the Academy

[thehumblegringo]

Strikers are a dying breed in youth football.

When I was a kid everyone wanted to be a number 9. Today you'll find very few kids who aspire to play in that position and if you ask most kids where they want to play now, they'll usually answer "CDM" or "CAM" (for those over 40 that's Central Defensive Midfielder and Central Attacking Midfielder.

There is also the situation where the role of the centre forward seems to change constantly every couple of years.

You see a player like Jordan Rhodes who was born to just score goals who currently finds it difficult to fit into today's game.

Would you call Roberto Firmino a striker in the old sense of the word? Yet he's probably considered the best around now.

[the other bob wilson]

Strikers are a dying breed in youth football.

When I was a kid everyone wanted to be a number 9. Today you'll find very few kids who aspire to play in that position and if you ask most kids where they want to play now, they'll usually answer "CDM" or "CAM" (for those over 40 that's Central Defensive Midfielder and Central Attacking Midfielder.

There is also the situation where the role of the centre forward seems to change constantly every couple of years.

You see a player like Jordan Rhodes who was born to just score goals who currently finds it difficult to fit into today's game.

Would you call Roberto Firmino a striker in the old sense of the word? Yet he's probably considered the best around now.

I'm researching the 1970/71 season currently and was reminded a couple of days ago of John Parsons who played just over eighty games in a career which took him from us to Bournemouth and, finally, Newport. Despite an awful lot of those appearances being off the bench, he scored a more than respectable thirty goals in that time, but I always thought of him as someone who did little else but score goals. On the one hand, that sounds an idiotic view when you consider how much we'd pay now for a striker with a better than one in three scoring rate, but it applies even more today - your use of Jordan Rhodes is a good example because the latter half of his career has offered concrete proof that merely sticking the ball in the net is no longer enough in the modern game.

I'd say Sergio Aguero could be classed as an out and out striker, but he's had to adopt a more of a team ethic and up his work rate under Guardiola and the only one I can think of coming through as a young player at the top level now is Tammy Abraham.

This trend can be seen in action at the Academy where the two best strikers we have in my view (Dan Griffiths and Isaak Davies) have both played in wide positions for the under 18s on quite a few occasions - the last player at Academy level who was a goalscorer first and foremost was Eli Phipps who left us a few years ago for Colchester but never played a game for them and I'm struggling to think of another before him in all of the years the Academy has been going.

Cameron Jerome joined us at about the same time as our Academy started up (autumn 2004) and would have played no more than four or five matches at that level before he broke into the first team.