Holt on a minute, are target men back in fashion?

By David Chalmers

If you’ll excuse the pun and read on…

Over a number of years, football has played with systems and tried to define formations while the brains on the bench tell us that their players aren’t confined to a sole set of instructions, but taking a look at the Premier League this season, it’s looking increasingly more like target men are the focal point of most sides at this moment in time.

Grant Holt, Bobby Zamora, Demba Ba, Kevin Davies, Ivan Klasnic (yes Bolton play with not 1, but 2 target men.), Emmanuel Adebayor, Danny Graham, it’s a list that can stretch even further if I felt like devoting more words to this article.

Analysing the starting eleven’s of the Premier League, you could say that there are currently around 12 or 13 teams that play with, or who occasionally play with a target man. The 4-5-1 formation started to gather pace with the arrival of Jose Mourinho at Chelsea, often criticised for playing a style that would rather keep a clean sheet than score a goal, and this formation gave birth to a brand of ‘super-strikers’. These are forwards who have it all; height, pace, power, strength. Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres, both now at Chelsea are arguably two of the first and the finest ‘super-strikers’ in the past decade or so.

You would have a hard time trying to find a team in Europe who don’t have the option of playing it to the ‘big man’ (well, except Barcelona but you can’t count the Blaugrana into any football equation in today’s world…), but when did we fall out of love with the 4-4-2?

The last great strike partnerships that come to mind were Manchester United’s deadly duo of Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole; a pair of strikers who netted 110 goals between each other in just three seasons at Old Trafford from 1998-2001. Joining them, if not superseding them are Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp, a pair of forwards that Arsenal fans will claim as one of the finest of all-time. The Iceman combined with his French counter-part to net an impressive 266 times in seven seasons; though Bergkamp was as equal a goal-scorer as he was a master of the art of playmaking.

The noughties have been a strange, yet wonderful decade for football; in 2003, Barcelona were playing Celtic in the UEFA Cup. Fast-forward to 2011 and the Catalans are at the top of the footballing pyramid. Footballers are as much celebrities and brands as they are professional sportspersons and the game itself has been riddled with controversy and gamesmanship (note the 2006 refereeing scandal in Italy, the increase in simulation and need I mention Sepp Blatter or Michel Platini?) but one of the strangest things that the decade has given birth to is the death of the 4-4-2 and the introduction of the lone striker.

Sam Allardyce, as manager of Bolton Wanderers, re-introduced to the nation a brand of football that they hadn’t seen in years as he proceeded to instruct his team to ‘lump it to the big fella’ in what can be only trumped in directness by your best mate’s aunty at a wedding. Jose Mourinho arrived in all his self-imposed glamour in the summer of 2004 and attempted to apply some Portugese flair to the precedings, passing off the lone striker as playing a 4-3-3, of course being an entirely different formation to Allardyce’s 4-5-1. Roman Abramovich’s millions were lavished on Didier Drogba as Mourinho looked for the perfect spearhead to his team of superstars; and the Ivorian fit the bill. Standing at 6ft 2 ½ in, the striker possessed all the qualities that one might have hoped from a partnership. Drogba arrived at Stamford Bridge with pace, power, height, and with a hunger to be the club’s main goal threat. The ‘Special One’ built his side around Drogba and even to this day Chelsea seem to struggle at large on how to play without him, a task Andre-Villas Boas faces if he travels to the African Cup of Nations, and as captain of the Ivory Coast he will almost certainly go.

Mourinho’s arrival signalled the end of the strike partnerships and the return of the target men; and we can see that from the large number of ‘traditional’ number nines that now occupy the Barclays Premier League. Are there enough goals in football anymore? Manchester United’s 8-2 defeat of Arsenal and subsequently being at the other end of a 6-1 hiding from neighbours Manchester City would say almost certainly not; however, nostalgia brings upon myself a hope for the return of the strike partnership.