City suffering the lost art of goalscoring

Moses Swaibu scored City's 20th League goal of the season, but that's nothing to shout about with the club having failed to score in more than half of their 27 League games. Chris Fagan remains the highest scoring current player at the club with a whopping three League goals, but just how bad are the Imps up front?

Step 1 : Raise leg and bend knee so that your leg is between 45 and 90 degrees.

Step 2 : Bend leg back so that your knee is now points at the ground.

Step 3 : Thrust leg forward

Step 4 : Apply force to the ball in the general direction you want it to go.

If you look at the squad, you'll realise that there are only four strikers at the club that play/have played on a regular basis up front. Chris Fagan, Delroy Facey, Lenell John-Lewis and Paul Connor have managed a poultry 5 goals between them from 41 shots. Infact, Rene Howe remains as the club's top goalscorer of the season and he left in November.

To be honest, it's simply not good enough, not even slightly and this club will never actually progress anywhere unless we get a striker who is capable of scoring at least 10 goals a season.

Many people will argue that Connor might be the answer to that, but the fact he has only had three shots in his five League games, none of which have looked like going in, tells it own story. Infact, if you extend it back into the pre-season and cups then Connor's record would stand at 13 games and only one goal, that coming in a 4-0 friendly win against Goole in pre-season.

Then you get onto Delroy Facey. If he's the answer then it makes you wonder what the question was. It obviously wasn't his shooting ability as he has barely managed an average of a shot a game and if Sutton hadn't played him up front on his own in a 4-5-1 system, then we could have easily got more points in recent weeks. 

So how does our current strike rate compared to other clubs? Well if you go from the Premiership to as far down as the sixth tier (the Conference North/South for those less familiar with the footballing structure in England), you'll only find a total of four teams that had scored fewer goals than us, all of whom have actually played fewer games than us.

However, it is looking reasonably unlikely that City will not surpass the club record for fewest League goals in a season. City managed just 27 in 1896/7 and 28 in 1910/11. However, at this rate this will go down as the worst goalscoring season since then. The worst season in recent memory was City's one season flirtation in what is now League One back in 1998/9, the club scoring 42 goals that season.