I have no idea on Klaasen, but he certainly seems to have a good pedigree. A personal preference, but I want a proper 9 rather than a false one. It will be an interesting window that's for sure!
I would too. But the thing is, when that Austin news came out, I actually sat down for a spare hour and a half and thought long and hard about what kind of striker Poch would prefer, and what strikers currently plying their trade in Europe's top leagues fit that bill. I came up with a bloody formidable list of requirements:
- Young, certainly not over 27-ish (see Lyall Thomas' tweets about that subject)
- Uber fit, stamina sufficient to run all day ('you need three lungs to play under Poch' as one Soton player once remarked)
- Willing enough to adapt to Poch's hard-running, excessively demanding style
- Good technical ability, to play short and long passes as the quick transitions demand
- Strong, to avoid being outmuscled when pressing/closing down
- Big enough to be competent in the air, to act as a substitute for Kane when he isn't available
- Enough of a record to show that he'd suceed in the Premier League
- Perhaps most importantly, a good person - reasonably humble, gets along with his team-mates, reasonably unselfish, willing to give his all for the team and his manager, not a prima donna.
That is as near to a 'complete' striker as you'll get, I think.
And then, on top of that, you'd have to add Levy's requirements: not carrying an injury which would impact on our ability to get insurance for him, resale value, not from clubs that would extract returns from our own club in the future (ie, United, for example: they'd likely insist that Kane/Lloris be included in any transfers of their players), not from clubs our chairman doesn't get along with (see Football Club, Southampton), etcera.
And to go even further, you'd have to find someone who was willing to rotate with Kane and spend some time on the bench: the first-choice CF position at this club, after all, is already taken.
And, running through all the strikers successfully plying their trade in Europe, I honestly came up very, very short: I found very few players that fit the bill. The ones that did were either impossibilities (Lewandowski, Giroud to an extent, Morata, etcetera), too expensive to pursue in January (Michy Batshuayi, Bas Dost, Kevin Volland), or (in the case of lesser-knowns like Depoitre, Milik and Khouma Babacar) too unproven to be worth the lesser-but-still-daunting price they'd command in January.
It's a punishing algorithm to pursue when searching for a player, and that's without factoring in Mitchell's basic statistical analyses, which no doubt will prune the list even further. The only one that really stuck in my mind after all that is Klaassen.
