After Newcastle's opener, one thing is abundantly clear. We are in desperate need for a striker. Obviously this is something we already knew, Newcastle have never won a game with Gordon at striker. A few chances had gone a miss vs Aston Villa and mainly due to a lack of presence up top. So who should Eddie Howe and the recrutement staff be attempting to buy?
There are a few options out there, we are already trying to bring Yoanne Wissa to the team as a backup striker and there has been links to Nick Woltemade made in the past few weeks (someone we are incredibly unlikely to bring in). But there has been 3 concrete links that we could chase; Samu Aghehowa, Nicolas Jackson and Gancalo Ramos. Ramos I think is the least likely out of the three, stated at the end of the recent PSG game that he wanted to stay, but could be used in a swap deal for Isak (if it was to happen I would imagine somewhere along the lines of Ramos + £90m). Nevertheless, there’s one major question we need to address before jumping to conclusions.
Will any of these strikers be able to recreate Isak’s 23 goal season?
Isak has played the most games out of all the mentioned forwards, appearing in 4 more games than Samu and Jackson, while playing over double the minutes of Ramos who spent most of last season coming off the bench. Isak also scored the most goals (23) followed by Samu (19) and then Ramos and Jackson (10). Theres a chance that Samu could turn into Newcastle’s new star man, he is only 21 y/o meaning there is plenty of room to grow. Ramos does intrigue me though, he scored 10 league goals last year in half the minutes of anyone else, more time could equal more goals for the Portuguese international.
A stat that I don’t know the need for but understand why it’s used is xG, how many times you expect a player to score a certain goal is an interesting way of measuring something. But can offer something to us here. Isak finished the season with 20.42 xG in the league, so scored 3 more goals than would have been expected. Samu is the only other striker out of the 4 to overperform in this stat. Scoring 19 goals on 14.07 xG.
That said, Samu does lack in shots on target per game, completing 1.1 per 90. Ramos actually tops the group with 1.5 per 90, he also tops the off target shots per 90 with only 0.9. A clinical stat from the 24 y/o. Jackson sits middle of the park with 1.2 on and 1 off per 90.
Overall I would prefer to bring Samu through the door, youngest out of them all and we all know what Howe can do with young talent. Monetarily? I think Ramos makes more sense. Scoring half the goals in half the minutes is impressive, unlike Jackson who has scored half the goals in a similar amount of minutes and games. I wouldn’t be angry at the Magpies bringing in either Ramos or Samu. These last couple of weeks will be interesting and Magpies fans will be anxiously waiting for some new additions up front before the transfer window closes.