Dan Neil has shared a message to Sunderland’s struggling strikers after a ‘choppy-changey’ first half of the campaign.
Sunderland signed Nazariy Rusyn, Eliezer Mayenda, Mason Burstow and Luis Hemir Semedo in the summer for a combined total of around £8 million.
Nazariy Rusyn became the Black Cats’ first striker to score in almost a year on New Year’s Day, as he doubled Sunderland’s lead over Preston North End.
The remaining three have only picked up 10 starts in the Championship this season, with the likes of Abdoullah Ba and Jobe Bellingham often being forced to play out of position instead.
Despite Rusyn’s goal against Preston, the Ukrainian was dropped for the defeat to Ipswich Town, and it is clear that the attackers’ chances are all going to be limited going forward.
With Sunderland struggling for goals in recent months, Dan Neil has fired a stark message to his fellow teammates.
Speaking to the Sunderland Echo, the midfielder said: “It’s just the predicament we find ourselves in. We obviously have brought strikers in over the summer. None of them have hit the ground running but we need to keep getting on to them in training, to keep working hard, keep improving.
“The shirt is there if they want it. It’s all about whether they want to take it and do the necessary things to improve, get better and show that it’s their shirt.
“For now it’s very choppy-changey. I think the no striker thing is a little bit of a get out. If you look at last year we scored a lot of goals, if you look at this year we’ve scored a lot of goals and played without a striker.
“It would be nice to have a striker firing and scoring but we don’t want to use it as an excuse because we got in the play-offs last year without a real number nine. We need to take accountability for that as well.”
Can we blame the strikers?
While Dan Neil is suggesting we can’t really blame not having a striker on our problems this term, it is a pretty huge reason.
There has been so many opportunities as of late where we have thought ‘a striker would have scored that’, or the likes of Jobe and Ba simply weren’t in the position where a striker would have likely been.
I don’t think you can put the blame on our current crop though, because they really haven’t been given a chance to impress yet.
How can you bring all these young players in from abroad and expect them to hit the ground running with only a couple of starts under their belt?
Their lack of minutes, accompanied with this team’s poor service, is why they are struggling. Not because they aren’t good enough.
Rusyn finally scored this month and would have been brimming with confidence – so what do we do? We drop him.
How can we expect these strikers to score goals if we treat them like that?