Go purely by the numbers and it may appear utterly illogical. Middlesbrough are the Premier League’s lowest scorers, a team who had two goalless draws in their past two games and failed to score in five of the last seven.
So their chosen antidote to impotence is a forward who has played 19 top-flight games and never scored.
Enter Patrick Bamford, the £5.5 million (Dh24.8m) forward charged with delivering the goals to keep them up. It is tempting to conclude Boro’s well-drilled defence will need to keep plenty more clean sheets. Yet the figures can confuse a more complicated situation. Bamford scored 19 goals on loan at the Riverside in 2014/15, was named the Championship’s player of the year and developed an affinity with the club and fans.
It was not merely a PR gesture when he posted a picture of himself in a Boro shirt on Instagram captioned: “Back home.”
Then there is the question of those 19 Premier League matches. Six were at Burnley in the first half of this season, all cameos that amounted to just 34 minutes in total.
He began last season at Crystal Palace, where a further six substitute appearances came to 119 minutes. He finished it at Norwich, who even granted him two starts to go with five games as a replacement. They came to 240 minutes. His last season-and-a-half has brought 393 minutes of league football.
“He used to be confident but after 18 months he’s not,” said his new manager, Aitor Karanka. It has been a wasted 18 months, as Bamford told Sky Sports: “It’s been hard. My development has stalled.”
It means he remains essentially unproven at this level, rather than tried and failed. Yet the reluctance of managers, whether Palace’s Alan Pardew, Norwich’s Alex Neil or Burnley’s Sean Dyche, to start him is telling.
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Bamford’s Championship strike rate — 39 goals in 68 starts — suggests he could make a step up. The same may have been said of Jordan Rhodes, a specialist scorer with 172 lower-league goals to his name, but none in the top flight.
The Scotland international is not a target man or a creator and does not possess the raw speed to stretch defences. He has played 208 minutes this season and Bamford’s arrival should facilitate his sale to a Championship club.
Poachers can seem dinosaurs. Specialist finishers lack the physicality of a target man like Alvaro Negredo or Boro’s other January forward buy, Rudy Gestede.
“I don’t think Patrick is a striker to play alone, for me he’s one who can play alongside another or on the wing,” Karanka said.
Bamford is not a winger but has volunteered to play on the right. Chances as a second striker may be limited. Few teams play 4-4-2 in the Premier League. Middlesbrough certainly do not.
The isolated Negredo has provided five of Boro’s 17 goals. The broader issue is Karanka’s innate defensiveness, meaning his team attacks with three players at times, and just one on occasions.
Perhaps three consecutive winnable home games, against West Ham United, Accrington Stanley and West Brom, will reveal a bolder approach.
Perhaps Bamford’s debut on Saturday will be an auspicious affair. Perhaps, too, it will enable him to make a point to the club that owned him but never played him.
Bamford spent five years on Chelsea’s books without being granted a minute of first-team football. He is indictment and endorsement alike of their recruitment policy.
They made a £4m profit on a player they picked up at 17. He had seven loan spells and represented a fine business decision. Yet now the significant numbers will be of games started and goals scored for Middlesbrough.
Both, he must hope, are higher than at his last recent employers.
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Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
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SUNDERLAND 2002-03
No one has ended a Premier League season quite like Sunderland. They lost each of their final 15 games, taking no points after January. They ended up with 19 in total, sacking managers Peter Reid and Howard Wilkinson and losing 3-1 to Charlton when they scored three own goals in eight minutes.
SUNDERLAND 2005-06
Until Derby came along, Sunderland’s total of 15 points was the Premier League’s record low. They made it until May and their final home game before winning at the Stadium of Light while they lost a joint record 29 of their 38 league games.
HUDDERSFIELD 2018-19
Joined Derby as the only team to be relegated in March. No striker scored until January, while only two players got more assists than goalkeeper Jonas Lossl. The mid-season appointment Jan Siewert was to end his time as Huddersfield manager with a 5.3 per cent win rate.
ASTON VILLA 2015-16
Perhaps the most inexplicably bad season, considering they signed Idrissa Gueye and Adama Traore and still only got 17 points. Villa won their first league game, but none of the next 19. They ended an abominable campaign by taking one point from the last 39 available.
FULHAM 2018-19
Terrible in different ways. Fulham’s total of 26 points is not among the lowest ever but they contrived to get relegated after spending over £100 million (Dh457m) in the transfer market. Much of it went on defenders but they only kept two clean sheets in their first 33 games.
LA LIGA: Sporting Gijon, 13 points in 1997-98.
BUNDESLIGA: Tasmania Berlin, 10 points in 1965-66
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British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition to find the Tutankhamun tomb, died in a Cairo hotel four months after the crypt was opened.
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