Marching On: The Goal Machine

 
 

In season one, I recovered from selling James Ward-Prowse, the best player at the club, to qualify for the Europa Conference League by way of a 7th place finish in the Premier League.

Season two has surpassed season one, and then some. We’ve played some brilliant football and had a European adventure. The biggest reason for a lot of what happened was down to our goal machine, Adam Armstrong.

The Goal Machine

In season one Adam Armstrong scored 30 goals in 43 appearances, 26 of those came in the Premier League as he finished runner up in the top goalscorer stakes. It was a great season for him, with it being his first season playing at that level.

In season two, he’s gone up a fair few notches. He finished the season with 41 goals in 49 appearances. 36 of those goals came in 36 Premier League starts, making him top goalscorer ahead of Manchester City’s Erling Haaland and Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappé.

Looking at his attributes I wouldn’t exactly say he’s an elite Premier League marksman. His role in the side is an Advanced Forward, playing alongside a Deep Lying Forward on Support, so let’s take a look at what stands out.

Elite Attributes

I love quick players and Armstrong is certainly rapid. His ability to get to top speed and then stay at that top speed are both elite level attributes, his two best ones. Defenders will struggle to catch him and then keep up with him, and that’s certainly been evident on a fair few of his goals this season.

Gonçalo Inácio has no chance of catching Armstrong here once he’s seen that space and run onto that brilliant ball in behind. This was part two of a double in a 5-1 hammering of Chelsea.

Good Attributes

He’s a striker after all, so his Finishing attribute sticks out here. With 71 goals in 92 appearances you’d expect he’d be an elite finisher. 14 is elite in some leagues, but the Premier League? I’m not sure. 14.40 is the league average for strikers to be fair, but if you compare to a few of his closest rivals in the goalscoring stakes, Haaland and Ronaldo both have 19, while Lukaku and Salah have 18 and Mbappé has 17.

You’d think Composure would help in his goalscoring situations. A rating of 12 though makes it difficult for me to make the case that it’s that that’s helping him to be our goal machine.

In the end, what difference do the attribute ratings really make when he can finish like this for us?

This is an elite level one-two and an elite level finish showing nothing but composure. The little spin to get round Oumar Solet once he’s laid the ball back to Diallo is beautiful and what comes next matches it. Hugo Lloris is left wanting with that cheeky dink. This goal rounded off an incredible 5-2 victory over Spurs.

Poor Attributes

You have no idea how many times this season I’ve gone to check Armstrong’s attributes after a match to just double check a few of them. The main one I’ve been dumbfounded with has been his 11 Off The Ball rating. You’d think that it was one of his elite attributes with some of his movement in the box at times to get on the end of crosses and passes.

Armstrong is on the left periphery of the above GIF and this goal was a regular occurrence throughout the season. Many of Tino Livramento and Kyle Walker-Peters’ 19 assists between them were them rampaging on from right back and firing the ball across for Armstrong to make that similar run he does in the GIF above. Kurt Zouma is caught ball watching and Armstrong is able to sneak in front of him, making that front post run to smash it in.

Sometimes a player, a tactic and a period in time just click into place and everything is perfect. Will Armstrong continue his goalscoring form in mine and his third season at the club? Who knows.

Switching Up The Squad

I mentioned in the last post that I was aiming to start making some big changes to the wide options in the squad. I outlined that our options of Walcott, Stuart Armstrong, Redmond, Elyounoussi, Djenepo and Tella weren’t exactly ideal in terms of age, quality and wage outlay. Of the six, only Stuart Armstrong remain at the club come the end of season two. The departures of the other five earned us just over £28m. Not bad but I needed to invest to replace them. In came the below:

The first three arrived in the summer, while the latter two were January window moves that I couldn’t turn down when presented with them. Based on output and what I’m seeing during matches I’m happy with the changes and I’m certainly classing them as upgrades. Gouiri scored 11 times and assisted 13 as he played the most amount of minutes out of the five. Jeong started the season superbly, scoring five and assisting nine, before a hip injury all but ruled him out of the rest of the campaign early in the second half of the season. Keane Lewis-Potter was one of the standout stars of our Europa Conference League campaign, but in Jeong’s absence took that form into the league. He ended the season with 14 goals and eight assists, a great return for his first season at this level for the young Englishman plucked from the Championship.

Following on from last season too changes continued in central midfield. After seven and a half years at St Mary’s, Oriol Romeu moved on to Sassuolo in January, but he’d already been replaced in the Saints midfield.

I’m not sure why or how Billy Gilmour was on the transfer list in the summer for a bargain £4.1m, but he was, and Chelsea’s loss has been our gain. My fellow Scotsman scored four times and laid on 15 assists on his way to being crowned signing of the season and undoubtedly high up on our player of the season list if it wasn’t for Armstrong’s exploits. He really does dictate the tempo in the centre of the pitch for us and has formed a decent partnership with his former and now current teammate, Ruben Loftus-Cheek.

Season Two Summary

You’ve seen a few of our goals and I alluded to us playing some brilliant football. How did that translate into the Premier League table?

That’s unexpected! The running joke of me playing this game is that I’m happy to trundle along and hit the targets expected of me (the board wanted mid-table!). As the season went on, as Adam Armstrong kept on scoring and as we kept blowing teams away we looked unstoppable and come the end of the season the top four finish is fully deserved in my opinion. We haven’t overachieved here, we’ve massively deserved it.

We were ridiculous in a 6-0 battering of Arsenal in August, Spurs were handed a 5-2 defeat ahead of the 2022 World Cup kicking off and Brighton and Sheffield United were both smacked 5-1 in the second half of the season. 2.5 goals a game is a great achievement and we conceded seven fewer than last season too. Third most wins and third most goals scored, we deserved third in the table.

Eight of our six defeats came as Man City, Liverpool and Leeds did doubles over us. All three are our bogey teams of the save so far, with us being able to beat just Liverpool and Leeds once each, and not picking up any points against the might of Man City yet. Quite ridiculously the only points we dropped against teams in the bottom half of the table was a 0-0 draw on matchday 37 against Wolves.

A special mention goes out to one of my signings from last season, Anthony Martial, who did the elusive double figures for both goals and assists this season in the Premier League and obviously overall too for the season. He scored 11 times and assisted 10 goals in the league, and hit 19 overall and made 16 assists. A great full first season for the £10.5m man as he finished above his old club in the table.

We might have had some success in the Premier League, but the less said about our domestic cup exploits in comparison to last season, the better.

After our semi final appearance last season, to have Nottingham Forest knock us out on penalties at the first time of asking in this season’s Carabao Cup is pretty shocking. I didn’t exactly play a weakened side but we were in the midst of a run of games that included Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.

A 3rd minute Abel Ruiz goal was something we couldn’t come back from in the FA Cup quarter final against Wolves. Manchester United went on to win both domestic cup competitions to make up for not retaining their league title from last season.

I mentioned a European adventure in my introduction, I led the club into its first ever Europa Conference League campaign. I said in last season’s post that I wanted to win it so that was my aim from the outset. Did we achieve it?

Was it our good league form that helped our Europa Conference League form, or vice versa? We scored 55 goals in 14 matches as we qualified for the group stage, swept our group aside and overcame Nice, Anderlecht, Sampdoria, and Standard Leige in the final to win the competition.

I said from the outset I wanted to win it, but I also made the decision that it was going to be the competition where we’d play some players who weren’t necessarily classed as first choice. I’ve already mentioned Keane Lewis-Potter took his Europa Conference League form into the Premier League come the second half of the season, but he wasn’t the only one to impress. We had another goal machine firing us to continental glory.

Last season Dan Nlundulu was on loan at Lincoln in League One. His exploits there, finishing as top goalscorer in the league, and his standout elite attributes (actually more than Adam Armstrong), made me think back to my opening post. Should I disregard a player just because I’ve not spent £15m on him and signed him from the Dutch Eredivisie? So Nlundulu became our Europa Conference League main man.

He scored 15 goals in 13 appearances as he finished top goalscorer and was named Europa Conference League player of the season. There’s always value in the players you’ve already got at your club when you start your save.

What’s Next?

Where do you go from massively overachieving? I’d love to do it all over again and finish in the Champions League spots next season but I’ll also be delighted to just secure European football again for the club.

With the board virtually in love with me I might start to look into some requests. I’ve got my eye on a St Mary’s stadium expansion with us being at full capacity 99% of the time this season in the league. There’s £150m in the bank that should hopefully be enough to bankroll it.

I’ve already lined up a couple of new additions to the squad for next season. FM22 wonderkid, 19-year-old Benjamin Šeško, is arriving from RBSalzburg for a knockdown price of £14.25m and Marcos Leonardo, a 20-year-old Brazilian, is arriving from Santos for £11.75m. They should bolster our attacking options even more. Do we need them? I’m not sure just yet, but those prices couldn’t be ignored for a couple of young talents. One or two players might leave but if we can improve on 96 goals scored in the league I’ll be bloody delighted.

Bring on season three.