Brief 25: The Best Non-Scoring Strikers

When I was renewing my list of Greatest Premier League Players

 https://takingsporttooseriously.blogspot.com/2020/09/100-greatest-premier-league-players-v3.html

recently, I got to pouring over the stats, and remembering a certain breed of footballer, which is the striker for whom the stats don't tell the whole story.

You'd think that strikers are the easiest footballers to measure with cold hard stats - the more often they score goals, the better, basically.

But I took to thinking very sympathetically of a few forwards who could hardly, in the scheme of things, be called prolific.

Since I've been watching them, England have had three notable non-scoring forwards - Peter Beardsley, Teddy Sheringham and Emile Heskey. They were all supporting strikers, for Lineker, Shearer and Owen respectively. Beardsley and Sheringham, in club football, have very good scoring records, but Big Emile is a perfect example of a striker who was worth more than his weight in goals, for all that didn't spare him the brickbats of England (and sometimes Liverpool) supporters. His career record was 164 goals in 786 appearances. But people loved to play with him. He was strong, smart, skilful and worked very hard.

One thing about Heskey, and several others on the list, is that they did not seem to be born non-scorers, which is perhaps where the frustration came from. When he scored 22 goals in the 2000-01 season, he gave a tantalising glimpse of a player he maybe could have been but wasn't really.

So it is with some of the others - Peter Crouch, Niall Quinn, Bobby Zamora, indeed Mark Hughes. Hughes is an interesting one - the striker for the champion team, but his scoring record, though not on the Heskey level of scarcity, is not stunning. We remember him being an excellent player, we remember him scoring great goals, but, especially in the second half of his career, he was a long, long way from prolific.

Of course, some of the non-scoring strikers were just not terribly good strikers, that's all. They played near the bottom of the division and stayed there and didn't generally score enough to get themselves, or their team, to a better place.

But there are a certain few who were really terrific and beloved players - who were a constant menace, who had skill and poise and power, and you made plenty of space and goals for other team members.

So, here are 20 great non-scoring strikers

• Peter Crouch
• Mark Hughes
• Emile Heskey
• Duncan Ferguson
• Kevin Campbell
• Andy Carroll
• Niall Quinn
• Kevin Davies
• Gabriel Agbonlahor
• Dirk Kuyt
• Shane Long
• Darius Vassell
• Danny Welbeck
• Jon Walters
• Jason Roberts
• Michail Antonio
• Steffen Iversen
• Shola Ameobi
• Kevin Doyle
• Carlton Cole

Honourable mention: Dion Dublin - he was all sorts of things, a reasonably prolific striker in his time who then started moving further and further back the pitch.

I've probably missed a few, and perhaps some are misrepresented here, but this is a decent selection.