1. He's only scored 2 penalties.
2. The quality point stands and unless you think we're going to be a relegation side next season the point is redundant.
We're an extremely jittery side with a very uncertain future ahead of us. How can the point be redundant when we've trended negatively for three seasons in a row?
We'd like to believe things will flip to the "right side" and the nightmare be over, but it's far from assured, especially with the names we're being linked with, who are coming out of bogs and troughs themselves and know nothing of the dizzying heights of even 8th placed finishes in the PL.
He's only taken 2 penalties for Ipswich.
This notion that Delap will go down from 10 open goals for a side that's not as strong in quality to 8 goals just out of fear is just weird to me.
Look at the player and how he suits the league. There's so many examples of his excellent carrying, hes very bullish and he strikes the ball very quickly before keepers have a chance to set themselves. He's an absolute pest at 22, youl struggle to find many strikers capable of doing this in their first year of PL football.
Mateta is an interesting comparison who was pretty shit before last season.
The madness of this thread for me is people acting like we've not just seen one very young striker completely capitulate under the weight of expectation here and are blindly lining up the next one to shoot out of the cannon in what feels like a cognitive dissonant haze where it couldn't
possibly happen again.
At Ipswich, Delap got a round of applause for participating - doing well, but for trying his heart out in a doomed team. If he comes here as our lead striker, especially in the post blues of Hojlund's disastrous campaign, he will be under even more pressure than Hojlund was/is and some will be even more antsy, skittish and unforgiving of him than they are of Hojlund.
The problem is, once you are the lead striker, you have all the pressure, all the burden and all the highs and lows of the #1 guy. Delap knows nothing about that life at a club like this. He may take to it like a duck to water. Alternatively, it may consume him. Whole. And that'd be where the lack of an experienced striker taking over the reins would once again bite us on our most sensitive bits. At the other clubs he is linked to, he is one of a few strikers and can/will share the load - he won't have a team on his shoulders. I don't know how anyone doesn't see the potential pitfalls in the predicament that could befall him here contrasted to anywhere else - and surely you can see how that might correlate with a drop in productivity if he does slump, or even if he needs a concerted period of adjustment?
I don't think his goal tally from Ipswich is 1:1 assured and transferable. There are so many reasons as to why it might not go as some envision. The dream is: better calibre of players with more distractions leads to him equalling or bettering his tally from this season, but this isn't FIFA and omitting the human element in favour of pure, raw data is especially precarious when it comes to young players who haven't hit their peak years yet. There isn't the data to even be assured this season of his won't be the anomaly. A supposed upward trend is as much imagination and hope as it is a logical alley-oop to a better and more rounded player.
What doesn't seem to be considered much in this thread is that Delap is a £30m punt, rotation and back up for the other clubs linked, whilst for us, it's looking like he's going to be
the guy; no experience ahead of him, nobody to share the load or even carry him in times of need. And what's more, in a considerably more pressurised and desperate situation than anyone else linked with him finds themselves in. That's a crushing weight of expectation, enough to give the kid serious props should he come in and thrive having known nothing of the sort in his fledgling career.
A last point would be, there's no certainty a player comes in and improves their tally just for being at a bigger club; even Andy Cole wilted and reduced considerably from prolific goalscorer to a more rounded player whose tallies weren't half as impressive, initially. If it can happen to him - a far, far superior player to Delap, in a far, far superior and settled team - then it can certainly happen to Delap.
