He doesn’t look like a striker right now. His movements aren’t much like one either. He’s not scoring goals, doesn’t really look like it. He wants to be a striker, but hasn’t ever really been one, not consistently, anyway. He maybe looks like a winger playing up top.
All feels a bit familiar, this, doesn’t it? Roll the clock back 12 months to the first Anthony Gordon flirtations with the no.9 role, a similar scenario is playing out right now with Matias Fernandez-Pardo. Albeit, in a seemingly less functional team.
And while the NUFC ‘eye test’ appears to show a lad who might be better suited out left, we have a player who was signed on a promise that he’d occupy a striker role. So play on as the striker he will. But he needs to justify that trust, and do so sharpish.