Twelve months after losing their star centre-forwards, Newcastle United and Sunderland are still a striker light, writes Stuart Rayner
IT is 51 weeks since the first big transfer of 2011. Not only do Sunderland still need a new centre-forward after Darren Bent’s shock departure, Newcastle United do too.
January 2011 was not a great month for the North East. More than £50m-worth of strikers headed south without being replaced. Despite a summer window to belatedly spend their loot, the Magpies and the Black Cats kick off the new year down a striker.
Of all the positions to be caught short, it is the most painful. Goalscorers win football matches.
Not only did Newcastle lose Andy Carroll on January deadline day, but their captain and top-scorer Kevin Nolan departed during the next window.
Yet it is Sunderland who have suffered the most.
Signed as a free agent once the window was shut, Shefki Kuqi was never going to be anything other than a sub-standard replacement for Carroll.
Hopes were not high either for summer arrival Demba Ba thanks to suspicions about the knees which scared Stoke City off this time last year.
It was not just the fans who did not see him as the final piece in the attacking jigsaw. The Magpies handed Ba the No.19 shirt and continued the search for a worthy No.9. They could not strike a deal.
Ba’s 15 goals have been a sticking plaster over the business end of Newcastle’s squad. Leon Best started last year and this season brilliantly, but his tally of three goals for the campaign is starting to look meagre.
Shola Ameobi bullied Rio Ferdinand into submission seven days ago, but could not hit a barn door at the weekend. Such is the way with a target man whose form has always been as patchy as his fitness record.
Peter Løvenkrands, currently injured, is a willing workhorse, not a first-choice Premier League striker.
Hatem Ben Arfa has provided the je ne sais quoi his manager Alan Pardew yearns but, denied a run of games, only sporadically. His artistry demands an orthodox centre-forward to play off and create for. Ba’s absence, for up to six weeks at the African Cup of Nations, shows Newcastle are dependent on him continuing to defy medical logic by playing so regularly with a degenerative knee condition.
When a deal for Modibo Maiga was scrapped over not dissimilar problems to the ones overlooked in Ba, Pardew declared the striker search off for another six months.
Now it emerges they have reignited their interest in Mevlüt Erdinç, who got away last summer. They need to be second time lucky, or unveil Plan C.
The massive strides made under Pardew deserve the further investment fans were promised when £35m was banked for Carroll.
At least Newcastle have strikers.
