The football world is as obsessed with goal and assists now as it’s ever been. We’re as guilty as anyone – looking up goal contributions to include in the transfer gossip; poking fun at a club trying to sign a forward with anything less than one every two games.
Players aren’t judged on how they play, how entertaining they are or even what they do for the team, but on their direct effect on the scoreline, whether it be putting the football in the goal hole or getting the football to the person putting the football in the goal hole. If a forward’s not doing either of those things we tend not to give a damn.
But occasionally someone bucks the trend, like Jack Grealish, whose goal contributions suggest he did f*** all in Manchester City’s Treble-winning season. He joins this list of five players who look a bit sh*t on paper but were actually bloody brilliant.
Jack Grealish
There will be some who argue that Pep Guardiola has turned the mercurial likely lad from Birmingham into a mere cog in his Manchester City machine, using him to draw defenders and win free-kicks rather than as a dribbling menace who shoots from weird angles and attempts the outrageous to earn oohs and aahs from the crowd. It’s a fair point.
But the football purists can take solace in him racking up just five goals and 11 assists in 50 appearances this season: a goal contribution every 218 minutes. That’s wonderfully terrible for a forward playing in the best team in the world and suggests – even though it’s arguably less true now than it’s ever been – that entertainment goes hand in hand with winning in the eyes of Guardiola.
Nutmegs have been few and far between and collecting the ball on the touchline before cutting back and passing to a midfielder is now Grealish 101, but the boy remains beneath the somewhat robotic surface. “I played so crap today,” he said, struggling to hold back the tears after the Champions League final, preparing for a celebration binge the likes of which many of his Kombucha-drinking teammates will never have seen.
His football may now be more soulless than his refreshingly average statistics suggest, but the cheeky chappy, Birmingham’s foremost fingerer, is probably still awake, drinking a warm lager and singing along to Fleetwood Mac as he counts the bruises on his prize-winning calves.
Gianfranco Zola
Zola became the first Chelsea player to win the FWA Player of the Year and remains the only player ever to win the accolade without playing a full season in the English league, presumably because journalists were a bit taken aback by a footballer doing other-worldly things like controlling the ball in 1997.
He did more than that though. 78 goals and 24 assists in 310 appearances for Chelsea tells a fraction of the story and is the perfect example of how the fascination with goal contributions can cloud the mind from what really matters. Zola had the ball on a piece of string, with his low centre of gravity and nimble feet allowing him to escape the clutches of the defenders who swarmed him. His free-kicks were works of art and ‘playing between the lines’ was all rather fancy pants continental before he arrived in the Premier League.
He “annoyed” Sir Alex Ferguson because he appeared to enjoy playing against Manchester United. “Nobody else does,” he said.
Roberto Firmino
Some say he was the most important member of the Fab Three despite his relative lack of goals and assists. It’s safe to say they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fabulous without him; or indeed a three.
With a workaday bunch of midfielders behind him, Firmino was tasked with the vast majority of the creativity from the middle of the park in Liverpool’s peak years once Philippe Coutinho had left for Barcelona. There have been few better players in the Premier League on the half-turn, and he has the wonderful ability to give defenders the impression they can nick the ball when in fact he’s got it under his spell.
Another one who plays with a smile on their face and spreads infectious joy to those who watch him, whether they were supporting Liverpool or otherwise. He will be missed.
Ji Sung Park
A slightly different inclusion in that Ji Sung Park’s YouTube highlights would largely feature him running maniacally from one opposition player to the next to save the legs of his outstandingly gifted teammates.
Andrea Pirlo described the South Korean as Sir Alex Ferguson’s ‘guard dog’ in his autobiography, after Park was used to shadow the playmaker in a Champions League tie against Milan. Ferguson regrets not using the same ploy to stop Lionel Messi in 2011. If anyone could have stopped the world’s greatest, it was Park.
Dennis Bergkamp
“He was a striker, yet not a striker – a midfielder yet not a midfielder,” Arsene Wenger said of Bergkamp at his testimonial in 2006, after 11 glorious years of the kind of footballing intelligence which we may not have seen since in the Premier League, and the odd outrageous goal.
He made the difficult look absurdly simple but you could almost see the powers of concentration involved as he thought two, three or four steps ahead of everyone else on the pitch, with distances, angles and velocities calculated in milliseconds to ensure he looked like a footballer on a different plane.