Unicorns

The first "twenty-goal striker" I ever saw play for Ipswich was David Johnson II. Jonno was an explosive striker of a football, a little guy with a surprising leap and hard to dispossess with his low centre of gravity. I suspect in 2023 it would not occur to anyone to make a player of his stature a centre forward. These days you're increasingly unlikely, as a short king (of Portman Road), to be afforded a bigger partner to work off. There will be an assumption, as with Conor Chaplin, that you'll have to do your best work further back, whilst someone a bit more rangy is the tip of the spear.

I'm not sure our recruitment analysis for Johnson would have been much more complex than "can he score goals?" Nowadays you seem to need someone who eats up ground chasing down goalkeepers and centre backs, who intelligently disrupts passing routes, who somehow transforms speculative balls forward into quality possession in the final third. Reading the game, exploiting space, forming a protective shield round the ball, building the play, we need all that as a baseline before we even worry about how regularly you stick the ball in the back of the net.

In basketball they talk about "unicorns", players like the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, with the athletic shape of a centre (ie. huge) and the technical skills of a shooting guard. The modern centre forward in football almost needs to be the same, physically dominant, fast as hell and also deft with the ball. Obviously this kind of player is absolute murder to recruit. As we tour the Championship, the vast majority of strikers we encounter have been mostly regular horses (and the odd donkey) rather than unicorns. The likes of Sunderland, Stoke, Sheffield Wednesday, Bristol City, Cardiff and Preston all showed up with strikers you barely noticed. Championship games devour centre forwards, the pressure on the ball and congestion in their bit of the pitch means it's pretty easy to wander off at full time having made no visible impact whatsoever.

Elsewhere we've seen good opposition centre forwards, who had some of the pieces and were a challenge to our defenders, but who weren't quite the whole package - Sinclair Armstrong, Liam Delap. For me, the only unicorn striker performance this season against us was from (£35m worth of) Georginio Rutter.

It's worth revisiting our Summer recruitment in that context. People were a bit underwhelmed when we got to the end of the Window with just George Hirst, Freddie Ladapo and Dane Scarlett. These days it feels like people want a "20-goal striker" and a stand-in at the same level, in case the first one malfunctions. We certainly hadn't managed that by September 1st, but week-by-week Hirst's recruitment in particular looks like an absolute miracle. £1.5m and every match he plays, his mane turns more and more rainbow coloured.

It's now absolutely routine for Hirst to be the physically dominant player against all sorts of opposing centre backs. Back to goal, you ping a pass into his feet, he reliably forms a sturdy protective shield round the ball and neatly lays it off or curls it out wide. He presses diligently and intelligently, at full speed and at good angles. His power and pace make him a threat in behind and in the channels. His ability to keep grasping defenders’ hands at bay and then sprint in behind was too much for Plymouth's Dan Scarr on Saturday. That athleticism has helped him to a goal or assist once every 139 minutes this season.

He's not yet the total package. Ideally, you'd want him scoring more goals, he’s slightly underperforming xG at the moment. Being picky, you'd like to see him develop as a penalty box striker -  landing on the ball in tight spaces, picking up rebounds and deflections, scoring from close in. He's also much less productive from crosses than he looks like he should be. The physicality is there for meeting teasing centres with one of those *BOSH* headers, but it hasn't materialised quite often enough. Every unicorn has some limit to their magic, I suppose.

Hirst's all round relentlessness does tend to make whoever replaces him look bad. He usually slopes off after 70 minutes, looking like every last joule of energy in his body has been fully expended, to be replaced by Freddie Ladapo or Dane Scarlett. I maintain that we are very lucky to have Freddie. He doesn't have Hirst's all round athleticism or pace, but unlike George, he is a high level penalty box striker, coming alive in dangerous areas. He won't always bully a centre back, but he'll hold it up well enough. He isn't a pressing machine, but he keeps going and affects the game. We should not underestimate how useful it is to have an experienced striker who can regularly impact Championship football matches prepared to sit on our bench and play a cameo role.

The difficulty of that kind of squad recruitment are manifest in the struggles of young Dane Scarlett. "Please come sit on our bench and get 20 minutes here or there" is not an easy pitch to a player looking to get on with their career. Nor is it an easy role or a flattering one. Of Scarlett's six appearances for Ipswich, five came in games where we'd almost done our attacking for the day and were seeing things out.  An intense press and full spectrum attack calms down and we drop into a mid-block, leaving the 9 to chase paper bags round a windy car park. When the ball does come his way, it's often in the form of an aerial duel with two or three defenders, without a comrade in 20 yards of him.

Still, Scarlett isn't influencing games and doesn't look like he's especially enjoying himself (even the Ed Sheeran sing-along didn't seem to lighten his mood). It is tough as hell as a 19-year-old with no experience at this level to feast on these scraps. There are mitigating circumstances and Spurs didn't help by making him ineligible for our EFL Cup games. But. As George Hirst knows too well from his difficult spells at Rotherham and Blackburn, that is what you're going to get at this point in your career and if you're going to thrive, that's what you have to thrive at.

Scarlett will ultimately be fine. He has a long career ahead of him and he'll get opportunities to be the lead rather than the understudy. For us though, Scarlett's struggles really highlight how tough it is to upgrade your striker options. Getting a great first choice number 9 is about picking your poison. What skills do you want and how much damage do you want to do to the bank balance. Getting the other guys to fill in is sometimes even harder. You're searching for someone who almost duplicates what your main striker does, but is happy enough to sit on your bench, for a reasonable price, whilst competing with a dozen other clubs who all want someone similar, potentially as their main starter. Hellish.

So you have to compromise. You pick up guys who are too callow to come with assurances, hoping more than knowing that they can reach the level you need. 19-year-old strikers do not generally thrive in the Championship, whatever their pedigree. Right now, Jobe Bellingham is the top scoring teenager in the league with two, both scored in the same match. The odds were always stacked against Scarlett being a massive success for us and yet he was almost certainly the best option available and someone we had to fight off competition for. The other options we seem to have considered currently look overpriced (Ellis Simms) or no better (Joe Gelhardt). The difficulty in finding strikers with a bit of everything highlights how well we did to pick up Hirst for such a modest fee. It should also make us grateful for the contribution Ladapo continues to make.

In January, the question of what to do with Dane will come to the fore. Tottenham can't send him somewhere else (that accursed EFL Cup appearance again), so won't ideally want him sent back. If Scarlett doesn't kick on, we might hope that our league position opens doors that were closed in the Summer, allowing us to get someone who is more of a co-main protagonist with George I and less of a squad player. That may still be easier said than done. Pretty much every football club everywhere is looking for players with Hirst's attributes. If Dane Scarlett and Ipswich are stuck with each other, making squad space will also be an issue. To compensate for our less effective than expected third striker, we might end up with the rather unfair outcome that we have to sacrifice Ladapo, the one who has stepped up, to improve the overall power of our striker group.

The search for George II won't be easy, but, for the moment, we can still take a lot of comfort in the good work already done, the two strikers currently doing the business. We can also rest easy that Hirst and Ladapo are improving all the time, despite the latter entering the final stretch of his career. If there's anything unicornish in young Dane Scarlett, our coaching staff will surely find it soon.

George Hirst v Plymouth Argyle

Minutes played 77

Goals 1

Accurate passes 10/15 (67%)

Chances created 1

Total shots 3

Shot accuracy 3/3 (100%)

Expected goals 0.77

Expected goals on target 1.46

Expected assists 0.1

Big chances missed 1

Touches 22

Passes into final third 2

Offsides 3

Tackles won 1/1 (100%)

Recoveries 1

Ground duel won 1/4 (25%)

Aerial duels won 1/2 (50%

Fouls committed 2