This season: one of the best strikers in the Premier League. Last season: not in the Premier League, and if we’re being honest not even really a striker. Kieran McKenna remembers Liam Delap coming to Portman Road with Hull late 2023 and starting on the right wing: trying to use his pace to beat the offside trap, trying to get in behind and fashion chances for Aaron Connolly, and mostly failing to do either. Hull lost 3-0.

The blooming of Delap for Ipswich under McKenna has been one of the unlikelier underdog yarns of recent months. Until recently, this was another young, gifted age-group forward whose career appeared to be meandering towards frustration, another item of floating big-club debris trying to pick up whatever scraps were left on the table. We’ve seen this film before. It ends with a series of unsatisfying Championship loans, three moderately successful seasons in League One and then a long extended dotage recording podcasts.

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Instead, Delap has become the other thing. The homegrown phenomenon. The genuine buzz. To watch the 21-year-old dismantling Chelsea in a 2-0 victory just after Christmas was to partake of the sort of tactile thrill that elite football serves up increasingly rarely these days: sport as ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), the equivalent of watching a video of a man methodically and sensually tidying up a garage.

With eight goals in a struggling side, Delap is the third-highest-scoring Englishman in the Premier League this season, after Cole Palmer and Ollie Watkins. There is talk of international honours before long. There is talk of a big move soon. Yet the sheer ferocity of the Delap hype is also basically a function of how improbable his profile has become in the modern game: a story of dwindling opportunities, outmoded skill sets and increasing systemisation. In a sense, Delap is the guy who slipped through the net.

This Sunday, Delap faces Manchester City, the club that reared and developed him for five years. The club where he broke all kinds of records at junior and development level, was hailed by Pep Guardiola as “the type of striker we don’t have, a killer, a typical British striker, an incredible finisher”.

In those five years he played 170 minutes of senior football, 90 of those in the League Cup. In between loan spells he would train in the academy building, park his car in the staff spots, away from the first team: at the best football club in the world, but at the edge of the picture, hanging on to this world by his fingertips.

Talent was not the issue here. Delap was a quick grower, a behemoth in junior football, with incredible pace, untrammelled aggression and an unerring eye for goal. The issue, in an increasingly stratified game, was opportunity. These days most clubs at most levels of football play a single striker. Often you see coaches doing away with the traditional target man altogether. By and large this is a game engineered to be played where Delap is not. This is a career with precious few job vacancies, and plenty of applicants.

This was how Delap found himself, last season, playing on the right wing for Hull. Loan spells at Stoke and Preston had come to nothing. But in a young and improving side under Liam Rosenior, Delap managed to make the best of things. He barrelled and buffeted. He took his chances when they came. He worked voraciously in training, chased and suffered out of possession. Had he not been injured for a crucial three-month stretch in the spring, Hull would probably have made the playoffs.

Meanwhile, his body was bulking out, his back-to-goal game improving: the ugly business of nudges and bunts and shielding the ball under maximum pressure. When he signed for Ipswich in a £20m summer deal, McKenna remembers being surprised how much Delap had physically developed since he last saw him, how much he relished contact with defenders, how perfectly he fitted into his new vision: a team that would not have the luxury of flooding the box with players as they did in the Championship, that would require a more traditional, hold-up centre-forward.

While Ipswich gleefully shared the goals around last season, this season Delap has scored eight of the team’s 20 in the league (and assisted two more). All this has been done on a bare minimum of resources: six touches and a goal against Brentford, 16 touches and a goal against Tottenham, 18 touches and two goals against Aston Villa. Most of his best work is done off the ball: top 10 in the league for defensive pressures, seven yellow cards, while only João Gomes and Moisés Caicedo have made more fouls.

The England talk feels pointed, for more than one reason. Harry Kane is obviously the man in possession; Watkins and Dominic Solanke the next in line. But respectively they are 31, 29 and 27 years of age. No other English centre-forward under the age of 25 has scored more than two Premier League goals this season. The top-scoring Englishmen in the Championship are the 31-year-old Josh Windass, the 29-year-old Josh Brownhill and the 26-year-old Callum Lang. In a sense Delap is floating out there on his own, a cohort of one, the world’s last baby. Where are the classic English No 9s of the future going to come from?

On some level these are also conversations taking place in Germany, Italy, France. Perhaps this is a Europe-wide problem, as increasingly industrialised talent pipelines produce abundant wide forwards and technical midfielders but not always the sharp-elbowed forwards who can provide the point of difference. Meanwhile aerial skills are harder to develop when children are increasingly discouraged from heading the football. Delap, for his part, would probably admit that heading is still one of the weaker elements of his game.

Certainly it is notable how many of today’s best strikers – Erling Haaland, Robert Lewandowski, Alexander Isak, Dusan Vlahovic, Benjamin Sesko, Victor Osimhen – come from nations with more organic models, where salt and brawn are less likely to be extinguished on sight. City’s new nine-and-a-half-year contract to Haaland is in part a measure of this scarcity, responding to a once-in-a-generation talent by signing him up for a generation. Delap, too, will surely get his premium move soon. Chelsea are inevitably interested.

In the longer term, perhaps the benign hand of the market simply corrects course. Perhaps Ethan Wheatley at Manchester United (18) or Will Lankshear at Tottenham (19) kicks on, beats the odds, gets the right opportunities at the right age, stays fit, stays hungry. Perhaps the next great English striker is currently a winger such as Anthony Gordon or an attacking midfielder like Morgan Rogers. Perhaps it’s someone we haven’t heard of yet.

For now, though, Delap stands alone, and in more ways than one. A player with the world at his feet, even if the ball usually isn’t. A forward from the old school who also – somehow – shows us where we’re heading.