Why’s it all gone wrong for Jurgen Locadia?
Jurgen Locadia – he’s not been great since his £14m club-record signing from PSV Eindhoven last January, has he?
In nearly a year with Brighton and Hove Albion, he’s managed a grand total of two goals. One against League Two opposition Coventry City in the FA Cup and the other a tap in at home to a Swansea City side already well beaten at the Amex by the time he was introduced from the bench.
He did manage an assist on a rare start away at Crystal Palace in April’s 3-2 defeat at Selhurst Park, but other than that his Brighton career so far will be best remembered for a succession of missed chances, an apparent lazy attitude and the fact he has seemed more bothered about releasing shit albums than scoring goals for the club.
With Locadia having told Dutch media he wants a move away to Spain or Germany in January, it’s hard to see why Chris Hughton would want to keep him come the next transfer window.
So, why’s it all gone so wrong for a man that the Albion were willing to smash their transfer record for and make one of the best paid players in the club’s history just 11 months ago, and who is to blame?
Jurgen Locadia
Locadia himself really hasn’t helped matters. From his comments back when he first arrived that he doesn’t like heading a football to his recent utterances at wanting to leave because he isn’t playing, he has never really done much to endear himself to supporters.
On the pitch he comes across as lazy, especially in a side full of attacking players such as Glenn Murray, Florin Andone, Anthony Knockaert, Solly March and Pascal Gross who match their talent with work rate.
The fact his finishing clearly needs working on has been in evidence since day one as, although he scored on his debut against Coventry, he squandered enough opportunities that day to have a hat-trick against a side mid table in the bottom division.
That inability to score reached it’s nadir in pre-season away at AFC Wimbledon when he had more chances than John Prescott’s had hot dinners to net against League One opponents, even managing to smash the ball out the ground with only the Dons goalkeeper to beat. He eventually subbed himself off, much to everybody at the Cherry Red Records Stadium’s amusement.
Five months down the line and it doesn’t look so funny now. Perhaps if he put the extra time in on the training ground to work on his finishing rather than concentrating on releasing shit music, he might be able to score a free header from six yards of the type that cost us a point at Burnley on Saturday?
Locadia’s injury
When Locadia arrived last January, he was carrying a hamstring problem. That meant he had to wait a month between signing and making his debut for the club. It seemed strange at the time to bring in a new player carrying a knock, bearing in mind we’d pulled out of deals for Raphael Dwamena and Renato Neto the previous summer due to injury concerns.
Some have said that his arrival with injury has unduly affected Locadia and while that might have been true for his first few months at the club, since then he’s had an entire pre-season to sort himself out. We’ve also seen Andone rock up with a far more serious problem, get himself back to fitness and do more in one-and-a-half games of football than Locadia has managed in 11 months. The injury excuse just doesn’t cut it.
The recruitment team
When Locadia came out and said he didn’t like heading a ball, it set alarm bells ringing. How on Earth does a striker who can’t head the thing fit into a side that is set up to play 4-4-1-1 and whose tactics are built around playing to Murray’s strengths as a target man?
Locadia had been successful at PSV playing in a front three, either through the middle or on the left. That’s very different to being asked to lead the line alone in the way that Murray does. From day one, it looked like a square-peg-in-a-round-hole solution and so it has proved.
Locadia might not be very good, but he also doesn’t fit the way Brighton play. Which makes you wonder why we forked out £14m for him in the first place? Was it a panic buy because the club feared a further backlash from supporters after they’d failed to bring in a striker in the summer?
Leonardo Ulloa, who signed on-loan from Leicester City a few days after the Locadia deal was completed, looked a much more natural fit in the way that Hughton sets up to play. We’d surely have been better off bringing him in on a permanent deal and leaving Locadia in the Netherlands.
Chris Hughton
Some supporters will say Hughton needs to take a share of the blame for not giving Locadia a chance or changing the way we play to accommodate him. But why on Earth would the Albion manager do that?
Locadia’s arrival coincided with Murray’s most productive form of the season to the point where he was in genuine England contention. The extra competition certainly helped push the veteran striker to even greater heights and Hughton would have to have sniffed some serious glue to consider starting an unproven centre forward over a man who was banging in goals for fun in a team that struggles to score who were fighting a relegation battle.
If Locadia had have been impressing in training or in a cameos from the bench, then he would have got his chance. Hughton showed he wasn’t adverse to rotating his strikers towards the end of the campaign with Ulloa starting at Burnley and Manchester City. Locadia of course got his opportunity at Liverpool and while supporters will say it isn’t fair to judge him away at the Premier League runners up, Ulloa scored away at the Premier League champions.
Hughton has also thrown Andone in as soon as he is match fit, proving he isn’t adverse to sticking Murray on the bench every now and again. Clearly, the Romanian has shown more in training than Locadia has, which probably says everything.
Brighton supporters
Brighton supporters have a longstanding tradition of decreeing any signing that costs a lot of money to be the best thing since slice bread even before seeing them kick a ball. It started with Diego Arismendi in 2009 who had to be amazing because he once cost Stoke City £1.5m.
The highlights of his couple of months at Withdean were restricted to a red card in the reserves, a red card in the first team, complaints about the noise emanating in the early hours from his flat in Brighton and his girlfriend leaving him to return to Uruguay.
It happened again with Craig Mackail-Smith who was another square-peg-in-a-round-hole. Locadia is just the latest example. Because he cost £14m and had scored goals in a very weak Dutch League, some Albion fans believed they were picking up the next Robin van Persie.
Locadia was never going to live up to those expectations, even if he hadn’t have turned out to be so abject. Rather than getting carried away by the fee, we should have looked at the fact that Ricky van Wolfswinkel and Vincent Janssen both scored goals for fun in the Netherlands yet were dire in England. Locadia also hadn’t managed one cap for the worse Netherlands side in history which should have been another question mark.
Maybe if the Albion fan base had gone into things realising we were signing a young, raw player from a league which is actually terribly weak, we wouldn’t all be so disappointed now? Unfortunately, it looks like the same thing might happen all over again with Alireza Jahanbakhsh, who has also flattered to deceive since arriving for big money from the Eredivisie.
