Johnny Phillips: One season does not make a striker

Perhaps there are no such things as shock transfer deals any more. We should be surprised by nothing.

In a world where Romelu Lukaku can command a fee of £75million, nothing is off limits. But the acquisition of Britt Assombalonga by Middlesbrough for a fee of £15m this week certainly matched the Lukaku deal when looking at it in terms of value for money.

A return of 14 goals in 33 games for Nottingham Forest last season does not make Assombalonga a £15m player. And that’s not even taking into account the knee injury that almost ended his career.

He has gone for big money before. Forest paid League One Peterborough £5.5m for him back in 2014 on the back of one good season at London Road and some prolific scoring spells lower down and in non-league.

I watched a lot of Assombalonga last season and he doesn’t always contribute much to the team in other areas of the pitch, but he has a happy knack of scoring goals. This and nothing else is the reason why he has moved around for so much money in a still unproven career.

Clubs will pay anything in the hope of getting goals. There is an old David Coleman quote about Kevin Keegan’s scoring exploits back in the Seventies that is just as applicable now. “Goals pay the rent.”

It’s the hardest thing to do on a football pitch and finding someone to score regularly is almost as difficult as the quest for the Holy Grail.

It has led to the current climate. Players who have had hot streaks in front of goal can command extortionate fees before they have genuinely proved themselves to be capable goal scorers.

Assombalonga may turn out to be a good signing, but there are so many cases of players failing to live up to a billing that they could never reasonably live up to. And there will be more to come.

One good season does not a striker make.

Saido Berahino is the classic example of that.

He became hot property on the back of that one decent campaign at Albion that he has never come close to backing up.

A couple of years ago there was talk of a £20m move to Spurs.

In the end Albion had to settle for £15m from Stoke last season but it was still great business. He has never looked like repeating that hot streak and Stoke are no nearer finding a proven goal scorer.

But there should also be some sympathy reserved for strikers signed for large fees. They don’t set the prices themselves and it is always used as a stick to beat them with when things don’t go to plan.

No other outfield player is judged in such binary terms. Score and you are a success, miss and you become a failure. The statistics are trotted out every week. “Berahino hasn’t scored in this many games”... “Joe Bloggs has now gone that many games without a goal.”

Misfiring strikers must have the damning commentaries ringing around their heads every time they go through on goal.

Where else on the pitch does confidence drain so visibly from a player than a striker who hasn’t scored in a while? There are hiding places for most other outfield positions. Defenders and midfielders can take collective blame, but the striker is the poor bloke with all these hopes and expectations placed upon him alone. One-on-one with the keeper there can be no substitute for that magic word; confidence.

Assombalonga will be the same player for Middlesbrough next season whether he moved to Teesside for 15grand or 15million.

But up in the stands he is a £15m player and supporters, boardroom and manager will want a return on that pretty quickly. Many a career has come to a juddering halt when a lofty price tag has been hanging around the neck.

The rewards are there too, of course. Strikers are generally the most feted and well-paid players on the pitch. One of Lukaku’s predecessors at Everton, Duncan Ferguson, “became a legend before he became a player” according to his manager at the time, Joe Royle, when the big Scot scored his first goal for the Toffees in a derby victory over Liverpool in 1994.

It was meant as a compliment. “They love their Number 9s,” Royle added, but it does illustrate how eager fans are to latch on to a goalscoring hero; in this case, after one goal.

Assombalonga’s move has shown exactly what sort of gambles clubs at that level are prepared to take in order to find a way of getting into the Premier League.

In such a competitive field, the club that hits upon a prolific striker could well be the one that wins promotion. And perhaps you can’t put a price on that after all.