Never understood that too. Weghorst just run around, tried hard, and that was about it. You could always see he was not a very good player.
With Hojlund you could see intelligence in his runs, reminded me of Shearer how he’d move to the channels, you could see he had great hold up play, great interplay, and made the right runs through the middle.
I say it without meaning insult to people. But when players like him are not scoring but playing how he was playing (plus add age etc) . Then you see from the comments who has a decent footballing IQ.
This hasn’t been said and is a bold comment. But take away the goals and Hojlund is in my opinion already a better all round player and forward than Halaand. Now of course football and strikers are judged on goals so it’s currently a moot point. But one I expect to start seeing being made and discussed in the coming seasons once Hojund gets into double digits for goals.
Football is a sport where discussions tend to get polarized as well. The space between Weghorst and Haaland is as gigantic as being almost completely unhelpful imo. At the same time, Wout Weghorst also in my view gets roughshod by many after his while here. Not many loanees play as much as he did for us after he came, andour results where mainly good when he played, despite him scoring only once(?) and despite injuries and fatigue cropping up at that time. He was no Højlund, but some things he did really well: positioning when we had or won the ball deep; recieving, shielding and distributing the balls effectively and often smartly; pressing smartly even though our pressing set up was new to him. There where things we could do thanks to him that we couldn’t do with Rashford, Ronaldo or Martial in the same position, despite his limitations. In fact, talentwise, I don’t know how often you see a loanee make so much out of so little.
In the end, he was never anything but a stop gap out of his league, and a symptom of the club’s problems in the recruitment set up, but he did more than his expected part to me, and Imll remember him fondly.
Højlund has much more in his locker, speed for one and finishing for another, obviously very useful for a striker. Yet even he has struggled with the same thing Weghorst struggled with despite his tempo - getting the ball when going on a smart run.
