A rare sight — Lampard scores

Let’s start by agreeing that scoring a goal is the hardest thing to do in football.

It’s a lot harder than stopping goals. It’s not an accident that top strikers always earn more than top goalkeepers.

Because scoring goals is so hard, the men who do it often are worth more than their weight in gold. A lot more.

Fernando Torres was sold for £50 million. Cristiano Ronaldo fetched £80 million. Even Dmitar Berbatov was deemed to be worth £30 million and Andy Carroll £35 million.

Scoring goals is hard. It’s valuable. And not just anyone can do it.

This looks hard, but it's easier than scoring

Agreed?

Now let’s agree on a second thing.

Chelsea are struggling this season in large part because they’re not scoring goals like they did last season.

After 26 matches this season, Chelsea have scored 46 goals. That’s 15 fewer than they’d scored at this point in the last campaign.

Chelsea are scoring at a rate of 1.8 goals per match. That’s a whopping 0.9 fewer goals per game. Almost a goal a game difference. A staggering difference.

Where have the goals gone?

Sick of not scoring

Easy. They vanished into Frank Lampard’s groin and hamstring muscles and Didier Drogba’s malaria medication.

The two men had career years last season. Neither man will ever score as many goals in a single season again. Drogba knocked-in a Golden Boot’s worth of 29. Lampard chased him all year to tally 22.

How good was that? For Drogba, 9 more than ever before. An astonishing average of 0.9 goals a match. That’s right, almost a goal for every time he stepped onto a Premier League pitch. By comparison, his career average is 0.49, a little less than a goal every two games. So 2009-10 was the best year of his life, by a wide margin.

Frank Lampard’s 22 Premier League goals were 6 better than his previous best and 9 better than his third-best season. His scoring average was 0.6, more than twice as good as his career average of 0.28.

So Drogba had a career year. Lampard had a career year. Chelsea scored 103. Had a league-leading goal differential of 71.

And yet they still couldn’t clinch the Premier League title until the very last game of the season.

Fast forward to this season.

Drogba has 9 goals. His average is a relatively anemic 0.38 per match. Lampard’s even worse. He’s only played 11 matches and tallied a woeful 3 times. We all know the reasons why.

So that’s where the goals have gone.

With the Big Two slumping, is it possible that the missing goals can be coaxed out of the rest of the squad?

He can't carry the team

Let’s look at their goal totals and their career averages to see if that’s a reasonable expectation.

Nicolas Anelka has scored 6 times so far, an average of 0.27. Last season he put away 11 at a clip of 0.33. (His best season ever was 19 goals, in 2008-2009 at an average of 0.5 per match.) So Anelka is not scoring well either. But if he were scoring at the same rate as last season he’d only have tallied 2 more goals at the most. That still leaves a lot of goals on the table.

The rest of Chelsea’s scorers are actually getting goals at rates above their career averages.

Malouda already has 9 goals. Last year he had 12 for the entire campaign (his best season ever.) His current average is 0.36, the same as last year and above his career average of 0.26. His previous best year was 6 goals in 2007-08.

Kalou has 7 goals in 21 matches, a .33 average that’s above his career average of 0.24. Last season he only netted 5 at 0.22. His best season ever is 7 goals, in ’07-’08 and ’08-’09.

Those are Chelsea’s top five scorers from last season. Essien is the only other goals candidate, and his career-best is 6 (he has 3 so far.)

Given these numbers, it’s hard to see where there are another 15 goals on the current Chelsea squad.

Which makes sense.

As we agreed at the beginning, scoring goals is hard. Only a few gifted men do it with regularity. Chelsea is lucky to have two of them. But they’re both having awful seasons due to sickness and injury.

Embracing a new scorer

So if you want to understand why Chelsea is struggling, look to the goals total.

It also explains why Roman Abramovich thinks it’s worth spending 50 million pounds to buy another of those rare creatures… the consistent goal scorer.