Very specific football question No.3: When was the last time no English strikers scored on a Premier League weekend?
No goals were scored by English strikers in the Premier League this weekend…
The Premier League is rightly the pride of England, with all its money and excitement and football. For the billions of people that watch it from Thailand to Timbuktu, many of whom may not have visited England, it provides a little glimpse of what English life is like.
Most of this information can be derived from looking at the people sitting in the stadiums. It’s possible to learn that English people jump up and down when their team scores, more so if they’re in the visitors’ section. You can learn that English people, unlike others Europeans, prefer booing to whistling as a way of expressing displeasure. Or that English people are very busy, and often leave games early to meet their important appointments, especially if their team falls two goals behind in the second half. It’s also evident from watching the Premier League that English people are principally white, overweight, about 40 years old and a little bit drunk.
On the pitch, it’s a slightly different story because most of the participants are not English, but still there are players like Wayne Rooney and Kevin Nolan who offer the global audience opportunities to learn how English people’s legs move when they run and how their faces contort when they complain to referees.
So there is a lot that can be gleaned about the English from watching its football league, but this weekend there was one glaring exception. Those tuning in from Thailand and Timbuktu would have learned nothing at all about how English strikers score goals.
That is because in a full schedule of matches, which included 20 teams from various English places such as London and Bournemouth, not a single goal was scored by an English striker.
Whether this is due to the paucity or the incompetence of English Premier League strikers is a matter for debate, but it’s probably a bit of both. Fifteen English strikers featured in 10 matches across four days, not including those who remained on the bench, and a total of 24 goals were netted in the division. But whether you were Wayne Rooney playing 90 minutes against Aston Villa or Lewis Grabban getting 22 minutes against Sunderland; if you were English, and a striker, and didn’t score.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless perhaps you’re England’s manager Roy Hogdson, but it does seem noteworthy that the English league doesn’t contain any goalscoring English strikers.
It raises the question of whether it has ever previously happened in football history, not just in England but in any of the world’s major leagues, that a full weekend calendar has gone ahead without any goals being scored by strikers from the country that league is played in. And the answer we are offering, admittedly without having researched the historical goalscoring of native strikers in all the world’s major leagues , is no.
