WOOTER NO SHARP-SHOOTER
Chelsea`s strikers have failed to spark in front of goal all season, so Gianluca Vialli decided to hire the services of George Weah for £40,000 per week. Across London, Tottenham have been seeking to bolster their wayward attack after a series of missed opportunities this season and last cost them valuable points.
But as managers continually look for the players that can make the most of their opportunities up front, which current Premiership strikers are most in need of a spot of shooting practice?
Of all the forwards who have fired in a minimum of 15 shots on goal - a number of efforts sufficient for some kind of consistency to emerge - the most inaccurate is Watford`s Dutchman Nordin Wooter.
Joining for £950,000 from Real Zaragoza last September, Wooter was Watford`s record signing, but the 23 year-old has struggled to justify the club`s investment in him - hitting the target with a meagre 19 per cent of his efforts on goal.
With such wayward shooting, it is unsurprising that he has failed to score, and, with only three sides creating fewer chances than Watford, the Hornets can hardly afford for Wooter to be so profligate in front of goal.
After Wooter, the striker most likely to trouble the fans behind the goal, rather than the keepers in them, is Coventry`s Noel Whelan. Of his 16 efforts, only four have hit the target, giving him a shooting accuracy of just 25 per cent. However, the former Leeds man can comfort himself with the fact that, while he hits the target at the rate of once every 185 minutes, it takes Wooter an average of 249 minutes to land an effort on goal.
With shooting of this standard, it is perhaps understandable why Whelan finds himself behind Robbie Keane and Cedric Roussel in the Sky Blues` pecking order. What is surprising, therefore, is that Roussel himself is fifth in the list of erratic shooters, with 30 per cent of his efforts finding the target. Where the Belgian gains the advantage over Whelan is in the fact that he fires in a greater number of shots overall, hitting the target at the rate of once every 103 minutes, and scoring twice.
Perhaps the man with most to answer for is Chelsea`s Chris Sutton. After the Londoners paid £10 million for him, they were probably not only expecting him to hit more than 20 shots by this point in the season, but to hit the target with more than 30 per cent of them.
Sandwiched into third position in the inaccuracy stakes between Whelan and Bradford`s Dean Saunders, Sutton has needed an average of just over three league games to hit the target once. With this in mind and a return of just one goal in the league, it is hardly surprising that the 35 year-old Gianluca Vialli has been plotting a comeback.
George Weah has said that Sutton is his preferred choice of striking partner at Chelsea, but Sutton has a lot of work to do on the training ground if his shooting is not to look decidedly shabby next to that of his new team-mate.
Stuart Condie
