Sunday evening, Roberto Soldado scored his first Premier League goal since March last year. A beautiful moment for him, and a welcome relief for us all.
When it comes to the extraction of pleasure at the expense of another, Premier League football is the absolute business. It's a schadenfreude machine: every week, a couple hundred hilariously overpaid, astoundingly talented human beings take to the playing fields and television screens of the world; every week, a few of them make complete idiots of themselves; every week, everybody laughs at them. What was he thinking? You can't do that! He missed from where?
However, there comes a point when a player's travails stop being funny and get a bit awkward. Roberto Soldado, for example, has long been floating in a strange, bleak space beyond schadenfreude, beyond amusement, beyond hope; a lifeless and lightless emptiness so vast and all-consuming that any laughter is instantly swallowed by the void. Where all the stars and all the hope died long ago, where there is nothing to do but drift and wait for a cut-price transfer back to Spain, where it's warm and all the pitches are the right side and the ball goes in the net again.
Strikers in good form look as though they simply don't know how not to score; Soldado, since apparently forever, has looked positively allergic to the very thought of causing a goal. Before yesterday's game against Everton, he had scored just twice this season, against Nottingham Forest and AEL Limassol (and it was something of a surprise to discover that). Thursday night, as Tottenham's headphone partner took a new approach to customer relations, he tried to kick a pitch invader -- and missed. A couple of months ago, he tried to slam a ball into the net from a yard out, the goal having already been scored. And missed.
And then he scored! On Sunday! A proper goal against a team of similar standard! An important goal! One that ended up winning the game for his team! And then a reprise of Ruud van Nistelrooy's fist-pump knee-slide scream-to-the-heavens celebration. Though presumably Soldado was more concerned with the iniquities of the universe at large, less with Martin Keown.
It was a good goal, too. not a spectacular one, but a smart one, and, most importantly, the kind of goal strikers should be scoring. Accept a through-ball, line up the keeper, slap it past him. (Helps when they dive out of the way, obviously, but let's put that down to Soldado giving Tim Howard the eyes. It's nearly Christmas, after all.) In a funny sort of way it was even more promising than Robin van Persie's long-range belter against Hull -- another striker scratching around for form -- because it was significantly more ordinary. Nobody was doubting Van Persie's ability to score the occasional belter, but it was starting to look like Soldado had genuinely forgotten what his feet were for.
Calling this the start of a comeback would, of course, be an exercise in premature evaluation. If the long, sad death of Fernando Torres taught us anything, it's not every goal after a drought is the start of a flood; sometimes, it just means he'll carry on being a shower. Soldado had his best game for Spurs for a while yesterday; not only did he score, but with Aaron Lennon and Harry Kane buzzing around him he looked involved in the game, which is not something that's always been the case. But then, one game is just one game, and Everton's defence is a generous and accommodating thing. Glen Johnson and Sergio Busquets also scored this weekend, so perhaps this is all down to an unusual alignment of the planets.
More important, at least for the neutral who just wants a bit of light relief with their EPL experience, is this works for everybody. If Soldado scores in midweek, then we can start wondering if he's actually starting to put things together. And if he misses from six yards in the accepted fashion, then we can laugh again. One goal -- one fleeting moment of success -- and he's suddenly back. Not as a striker, not yet, but back from that hopeless vacuum where nothing exists, bar pity. It would be nice to see him work it all out, not least because he does seem to want to. But if he can't, then it's good to know we can once more enjoy watching him flail about. At least for a bit.
from SBNation.com - All Posts http://ift.tt/1rMEJLF
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