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Euro 2008 Championships; The Draw
Topic Started: Dec 2 2007, 04:05 AM (1,501 Views)
Simon
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Merengue,Jun 30 2008
11:40 PM
This was a tournament of midfielders.

I think this represents one of the weaknesses of football in 2008, not just in Europe but everywhere, in that there seem to be precious few great goalscorers around. Before the tournament I was picking a fantasy football team and trying to choose which would be the strikers who would score 5 or 6 goals and battle for the Top Scorer's award. I could hardly think of anyone and in the end I settled for Torres because of his club form and Klose because although I don't think he's great he never lets Germany down. In the end, neither especially justified the choice but there wasn't really anyone else I missed out on either. After his hat-trick against Russia I thought Villa might be the one, but he only scored once in the next five games. This was still enough to be tournament top scorer!

Manchester United need a new striker this summer (whether or not we sell balsa boy Louis Saha he does need replacing!) and we spoke the other night of 'if you could sign any striker in the world, who would it be'? Just a few years ago we could have been naming names for a while but at this time the list seems very short and we were struggling almost immediately. There are very few players right now you could convincingly suggest as 'best striker in the world'. Not Shevchenko anymore. Torres? Hmm, maybe. Drogba? Perhaps. It's pretty hard to say Luca Toni. Adebayor? Well, not really but maybe we can now see why such apparently vastly-inflated sums are being quoted for him (Adebayor for £30m? Really?) - perhaps that's the premium you must pay right now for a bloke with some sort of track record for sticking the ball in the net!

It's probably just coincidence rather than a fundamental change in the way the game is played, I'm sure in a couple of years (or even months!) time we'll have a more convincing new crop of Mullers, Linekers, Batistutas etc. Hopefully led by whoever United sign this summer!
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gaviota
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I don't know if Simon's point about a lack of quality forwards is true. There are some good ones out there. Spain has three pretty good ones in Villa, Torres and Guiza, there is van Nistelrooy and Huntelaar, even if the latter rarely played for Holland, Klose may not have been in good form for Germany but his club record is a good one, his teammate Gomez and France's Benzema are young forwards who've already shown they can produce at the club level. This Euro may have been a bit too soon for them though. Russia's Pavlyuchenko showed well and his teammate Pogbrenyak missed the competition through injury. Toni is one player for his club but unfortunately for Italy a lesser one with his national team. Drogba and Eto'o have been top class forwards the past few years even if they may not have had their best seasons this past year.

So I think there are plenty of quality forwards but the formation of choice now days is to use one forward which is going to restrict a center forward's goal scoring opportunities and increase those of the attacking midfielders. That is why I think we saw many more attacking midfielders starring in Eiro 2008 instead of forwards.
CHAMP13NS
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Gunners
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If I had to choose one center forward, I'd still take Van Nistelrooy. He doesn't do much else, but he's still one of the best finishers I've ever seen.
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rosarino
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I'm with Gunners, I think van Nistelrooy is the player I'd pick as a center forward to build a team around too. He's also shown with both Real Madrid and Holland that he has refined his game to be more than just a goal poacher.
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Simon
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I'll obviously always hold a torch for Van Nistelrooy even if he's not as mobile as United needed for our fast inter-changing style of play and lost his place in the United team. Benzema, Huntelaar and maybe Pogrebnyak are promising ones to bear in mind for the near future although none of them is quite at the top of world football just yet. I do like what I've seen of Guiza but at 27 he's not actually that young is he? He's just had a breakthrough season with Mallorca but didn't seem to attract great interest from top clubs, and now he's at Fenerbahce. It just seems to me that clubs looking for a striker in this summer's transfer maket have fairly meagre pickings from which to choose and so we're seeing some grossly inflated prices as there's a premium on players who can score some goals. Adebayor is a good player but £36m would be daylight robbery.
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Johnbuildr
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gaviota,Jul 6 2008
04:31 PM
I don't know if Simon's point about a lack of quality forwards is true. There are some good ones out there. Spain has three pretty good ones in Villa, Torres and Guiza, there is van Nistelrooy and Huntelaar, even if the latter rarely played for Holland, Klose may not have been in good form for Germany but his club record is a good one, his teammate Gomez and France's Benzema are young forwards who've already shown they can produce at the club level. This Euro may have been a bit too soon for them though. Russia's Pavlyuchenko showed well and his teammate Pogbrenyak missed the competition through injury. Toni is one player for his club but unfortunately for Italy a lesser one with his national team. Drogba and Eto'o have been top class forwards the past few years even if they may not have had their best seasons this past year.

So I think there are plenty of quality forwards but the formation of choice now days is to use one forward which is going to restrict a center forward's goal scoring opportunities and increase those of the attacking midfielders. That is why I think we saw many more attacking midfielders starring in Eiro 2008 instead of forwards.


I tend to agree more with Simon. Sure, you can name a small handful of super stars, but even most of them seem to be somewhat inconsistent. It just doesn't seem like there is any sizeable group of strikers making big names for themselves across the Euro club and national team fronts like there used to be.
Maybe it's because we look back and see and remember the historic names and think of them as being bigger than life, bigger than they really were, I don't know. But as Simon said, there are not a whole lot of slam dunk, guaranteed goal scorers out there to choose from. :(
Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum



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Yogi
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I think depth at a particular position internationally goes in cycles and right now, while there clearly are some good forwards out there, they are outnumbered by more talented midfielders and wingers. The trend with formations now also is to have attacking midfielders and wingers swarming forward to help support a forward so maybe that contributes to it too. Then look at who ended as European league's top scorer this past season? Cristiano Ronaldo, a winger.
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