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Saturday, 24th July 2010

Let's finish the summer football season properly — the Greatest Striker Pairings

Right, let's first finish the summer football season properly after Spain's win in the World Cup.

The Guardian had an interesting piece yesterday about some of the greatest one-two goals in the history of football. One of the goals showed in the YouTube video spotted by The Guardian was a goal scored after a series of one-twos between two Manchester United strikers.

This for me opened up the debate about the greatest striker pairings in football. I am a Liverpool and Nantes supporter and I have seen many video clips of Liverpool in the years of Kevin Keegan and his partnership with John Toschak seems to have been amazing. The years I know more about are those of Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush, or John Barnes and John Aldridge. In Nantes, in France, our team didn't have great striker pairings, any one in the team would score in the days where Nantes' total football dominated French football. OK, David Trezeguet and Thierry Henry were together at Monaco but they had not developed yet into World Class strikers then. When Trezeguet went to Juventus in Italy it was him + anyone else ! Moving on to Spain you had what I would call probably the most technically gifted striker pairing I've ever seen : Raul + Morientes for Real Madrid. The drag-backs, dribble, overhead kicks, two-footedness, feints, etc..., that these two could conjure at any moment contributed to absolutely fantastic goals for Real Madrid. Arsenal in England also had some good pairings but I can't remember them. Staying in Spain, Barcelona 2009 had an unbelievale trio : Samuel Eto'o, Thierry Henry, Lionel Messi, in that order. Those 3 on their own contributed to just over 100 goals in Barcelona's incredible 2009 season where they won La Liga, la Copa Del Rey, the Champions League, and the European Super Cup. That trio has to be the most unbelievable trio of strikers in a single season seen anywhere. I don't believe we will ever see anything like it ever again — I simply do not believe we will ever again see 3 strikers scoring over 100 goals in one season !

So, which is the best ?

Well, all of the pairings I've mentioned above, and that Eto'o, Henry, Messi trio, that trio, were playing in great teams where most of the goals scored by those strikers came as a result of great team play eventually servicing the strikers for them to slot home, many times in beautiful fashion.

But there is one pair I have not mentioned, it is the pair I alluded to at the beginning of this blog. As I've said I am a Liverpool supporter, but that Manchester United pair of strikers is, for me, the best ever striker pairing the World has ever seen and my reasons for this is that Andy Cole and Dwight Yorke had a telepathic partnership, a partnership where they, on their own, created the goals with unbelievable inter-play and totally telepathic positioning. Yes, they played for a great team too, but the difference between them and all the other pairings mentioned about is that these two raised the concept of striker partnership to poetic levels. Judge for yourself — watch this magic :

—— (TUT) SpaceMan