Tottenham Hotspur: Striker Search Symptomatic of Shortage in Modern Game

Tottenham Hotspur fans were left bemoaning another match in which their strikers failed to score after Sunday's 3-0 defeat to West Ham.

Although Roberto Soldado scored twice from the penalty spot in the first two weeks of the season, the Spaniard and Jermain Defoe have not managed a single goal from open play in all seven league games.

The club's lack of an attacking threat against Premier League opposition in recent weeks meant the West Ham loss was a setback some Spurs fans would have seen coming. Tottenham had averaged just a goal a game despite picking up 13 points from their first six matches. 

Apart from the Hammers' first goal coming from a set piece, there will not be too many worried about the goals let in, as the other two came when Spurs were chasing the game. And there were just two goals conceded in the six previous matches.

So it is scoring which will surely be Andre Villas-Boas' chief concern as his players go off for the international break.

And it would have been before the summer break too. Last season, strikers Emmanuel Adebayor and Jermain Defoe scored just 16 league goals between them, with Spurs relying on Gareth Bale's brilliance to bring them most of their wins.

It is not as if Villas-Boas has done nothing to rectify the situation. He has signed Soldado and wingers Erik Lamela and Nacer Chadli for a combined £59 million. The trio scored 51 times between them in their respective previous leagues last season. Midfielders Christian Eriksen and Paulinho have also been brought in to improve the supply line.

Whether these players have the attacking qualities to hand Tottenham the Champions League place they missed out on last year has been one of the questions asked in the post-mortem following the West Ham result. A lack of width has been one of the factors pointed to.  

But what Tottenham's struggles undoubtedly prove is how hard it now is to find a truly prolific goalscorer, and why their value has become so inflated. Despite possessing one of the best scouting networks in Europe and having tens of millions of pounds to spend, Spurs have been unable to call upon a strike force able to weigh in with 30 league goals.  

Assuming Bale is not viewed as a striker, the last time a Spurs forward line managed that was in 2007/08, when Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov were at the club. They both left the following summer. 

Although Defoe—who scored 18 in the 2009/10 league season—and Roman Pavlyuchenko, the returning Keane and Adebayor, have all had purple patches and hinted that they may be the 20-goals-a-season striker Spurs fans crave, no-one has yet provided a lasting solution.

Looking around, though, it is not as if every other Premier League club has a striker capable of scoring that many goals.

The unattainable Robin Van Persie and Luis Suarez were the only players, along with Bale, to reach 20 goals last season. Landing Christian Benteke, who finished with 19 and looks like one of Europe's best young forwards, proved too difficult even with Tottenham's budget.

And signings such as Michu—all but unknown to British fans before his arrival at Swansea but a scorer of 18 league goals last season—shows there are goalscorers out there. But sometimes landing them means taking a gamble or two in a market where over-priced misfits are as common as success stories; Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll are examples of that.

The difficulty of finding a good one was something Villas-Boas' predecessor Harry Redknapp summed up  to The Telegraph's John Ley in 2011:

"

I'd like to get another front man, if I can. They’re difficult to find. We went for [Giuseppe] Rossi last year and he was suddenly £35million. We could have had him before for £18million. But we didn’t do it. ... We're looking for strikers, not for £35million, but they’re hard to find, everyone's looking for them.

"

With Soldado still adapting to the English game and Defoe always capable of hitting a rich vein of form, perhaps Tottenham fans have more reasons for optimism than most when they look at their club's current striking options.