Janssen Isn’t Soldado But There’s Room For Improvement
There’s been treacherous goings-on in the Strikers’ Guild this week, after Tony Cascarino broke omertà and took an almighty swing at Tottenham’s Vincent Janssen. Cascarino’s suggestion was that the young Dutchman’s skillset might be better suited to the Championship:
‘He leads the line well, but is not quick enough’, he told The Times.
‘He has a similar style to Glenn Murray.’
Burn.
Or is it? The comparison to Glenn Murray might seem a little severe; a man who recently turned thirty-three and has just eleven Premier League goals to his name.
But, like Murray, last season’s Eredivisie top scorer isn’t the most fleet-footed of sorts. Indeed, if your upper-torso is built like Johnny Bravo’s, speed is unlikely to be your ally.
To combat their limited pace, then, players like Janssen and Murray must utilize their other attributes to make things work for them. In this case, their sound technique and craftiness in the area.
This season, Janssen’s cunning strategy in search of goals has been two-fold. First, wait for you or a teammate to get fouled in the box. Second, thump in the resultant penalty. He’s certainly mastered that.
With all the success from the spot, and little goal action to speak of anywhere else, an easy parallel for concerned fans to draw on is Roberto Soldado. His brief career at Spurs too centred on the quite niche, albeit useful ability to convert a motionless ball from 12 yards.
Come the end, sadly, he’d forgotten even how to do that. His penalty miss against Man City in October 2014, in which Soldado looked like a broken man even before his run-up, rather encapsulated his time in North London. Poor Bobby Soldier.
Fans were desperate for the Spaniard to prosper at White Hart Lane; this, after all, was an international-grade striker who’d scored 59 goals in 101 La Liga games for Valencia. His touch was majestic, his interplay to be admired and, most of the time, he tried godamnit. But it never quite clicked.
Although there’re certainly similarities in the way life has begun in England for Janssen, the weight of expectation isn’t quite as weighty. At 28, Soldado arrived on these shores supposedly as the finished article, which was reflected in his considerable price tag. Just give him the number 9 shirt, point him in the right direction and let the goals pile-up.
Vincent Janssen, on the other hand, was only really bought as an understudy to Harry Kane— it’s the England striker’s continued absence that has put the 22-year-old under this much scrutiny. He’s been involved in every League game this season, to some degree.
A worry for Janssen is that the creative influences that operate behind him, don’t seem to bringing their A-game either. Cristian Eriksen, for example, in Spurs’ recent stalemate with Bournemouth, only produced one single chance during the game. Not the ideal backdrop for a centre-forward struggling with form.
Original article on Yahoo! Sport
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