Chelsea and misfiring strikers – it’s a match made in heaven and a tale as old as time.
The great forwards we’ve had over the years – Didier Drogba, Diego Costa, Jimmy-Floyd Hasselbaink – have all been the exception rather than the rule. In between them there’s been a lot of dross.
Just look at our post-Costa efforts. Most of them shone brightly for a brief spell, but none were ever able to fill his boots properly. We’ve tried and failed so many times, and that number 9 shirts’ curse still seems to hang heavy.
We’ve managed great success even without a true successor up front, but boy would it be useful to have one. One of the common threads from all of the last few years is the lack of a consistent goalscorer up top. That’s hardly unique to us – most teams in the league are always hunting for a regular scorer. But given the billions we’ve spent, the return has been remarkably poor.
Just a couple of months ago, most of us were convinced we had finally cracked it. Nicolas Jackson started the season strong, building on last year’s improvements, and we really thought that he had reached a new level.
By late November, the briefs from the club were that they considered him among the 3 best strikers in the Premier League.
He is not a natural finisher, but his link up play and effort off the ball seemed to compensate. And he was still scoring regularly – after we beat Brentford in mid-December he had scored 9 in 16 Premier League starts. That had him on course for a 21 goal season, without penalties. That’s decent.
Let’s not forget, Drogba was never super prolific, but his other qualities more than made up for it.
But since that game he’s scored 0 in 5 starts. His confidence looks gone and his bad finishing technique has come to the fore: even an AI image generator would struggle to figure out how he contorted his body shape and missed that chance at the near post against Bournemouth on Tuesday. It was not an easy one, but a deadly finisher makes sure that’s at least on target.
That miss cost us 2 points, in all likelihood. Look at the other 4 games in this run and you’ll see plenty more points slipping from the striker’s toe.
He’s still got a huge amount to offer, but without a dramatic improvement in his finishing, he’s never going to join the short list of elite strikers in the Chelsea history books.
