Could Glenn Murray become Brighton’s record scorer this season?

Glenn Murray will enter the 2019-20 season with 109 goals for Brighton and Hove Albion to his name. That currently leaves him second on the Seagulls’ all time top goalscorers list, behind only Tommy Cook on 123.

Cook’s record has stood for 90 years and in truth, nobody has come close to it. Kit Napier made it to 99 before an untimely falling out with manager Pat Saward brought the curtain down on his Albion career in 1972.

Peter Ward and Bobby Zamora might have gone past Cook had they not moved onto bigger and better things, Ward with Nottingham Forest and Zamora with West Ham United and Fulham.

Those two both of course returned for brief second spells with the Albion, but neither was enough to see them pass a century, let alone get within striking distance of Cook.

Murray could though. Brighton’s second-highest ever goalscorer needs 15 goals in the 2019-20 season to surpass Cook and write his name into the history books. The chase for the record could be one of the intriguing subplots of the campaign.

Will he get there? Well, that depends on rather a lot. How he fits into Graham Potter’s system. Whether he can stay fit and firing past his 36th birthday. And what the Albion do in the transfer window over the next month.

How will Murray fit into Potter’s system?
Nobody can say for certain how Potter will use Murray. Nobody knows what system he will deploy, the style of football he will use or the personnel he’s going to select.

That’s one of the most exciting and interesting things about Potter’s appointment. The uncertainty about what he is going to do.

At Ostersunds, he settled on a formation and tactics to suit the players he had. When he moved to Swansea City, he changed his ways and adapted to what he found at the Liberty Stadium.

Given that Murray has scored 36% of the Albion’s goals in the Premier League – no other club since Sky Sports invented football in 1992 have been so reliant on one man to net – Potter could come to two conclusions.

The first is that he needs to devise a way of getting goals from elsewhere to ease the burden on Murray. The fact that Shane Duffy was second top scorer last season is a damning indictment of the efforts of Florin Andone, Jurgen Locadia, Alireza Jahanbakhsh and the midfield players.

The second deduction Potter could make is that he is inheriting a forward with a proven Premier League track record. That’s born out by the fact that Murray was the third-most clinical striker in the top flight last season, behind only Anthony Martial and Sadio Mane.

Murray converted 24.1% of the chances he had. If Murray took the same number of shots as Mo Salah, he’d have scored 33 goals. Put Murray in Sergio Aguero’s boots, and he’d have notched 28.

If Potter can formulate a way to create more opportunities for Murray, then he will score more goals. That’s certainly something the striker himself believes, having told people in and around the club that if Chris Hughton took the handbrake off last season, he reckoned he could have scored another six.

Six more goals on top of the 15 he got last season would give Murray 21 in 2019-20. Should Potter release the handbrake – as many of us expect – and decide Murray is the man to continue leading the line, then based on that, the record will be his.

Can Murray stay fit and firing at the age of 36?
One thing that we’ve all learnt about Murray is never write him off. Some Albion fans thought he was too old when he returned at the age of 33 in the summer of 2016. He duly fired us to promotion.

He would be too old for the Premier League in 2017-18. 14 goals later and he’d kept us up. 2018-19 would definitely be a bridge too far. 15 goals later in a struggling team said otherwise. If he can score 15 times again in 2019-20, he’ll overtake Cook.

Like a fine, balding wine, Murray seems to be getting better with age. It helps that he’s never relied on pace. He’s always been an intelligent player, making the right runs and always finding himself in the right place at the right time. With experience, he’s become even better at that.

He’s also managed to stay relatively injury free. That’s quite astonishing given how much of his first spell with the Albion he spent sidelined, normally with hernias. He’s also suffered serious knee injuries on a couple of occasions throughout his career.

Murray clearly looks after himself well and there’s no reason to think he can’t go on for a few more years yet, unless an unfortunate injury strikes.

Many of us thought that was the case with that horrific head injury and concussion that he received away at Newcastle United, but he was back in the starting line up a week later – and scoring his 100th goal against Wolverhampton Wanderers.

As we said, write him of at your peril.

Will Brighton sign another striker?
This could be the deciding factor in whether Murray passes Cook’s record this season – what sort of competition is he going to have for a spot in Potter’s starting line up?

It feels like we’ve spent every summer since Cook retired in 1929 to move to South Africa needing a new centre forward. In 2019, it’s become a near impossible task to sign one.

Should a decent striker become available, chances are that every other team in the bottom half of the Premier League is going to want their signature.

The competition for signing centre forwards is ridiculous. As is the price. Plucky Little Bournemouth paid nearly £20m for Dominic Solanke in January and he is yet to score a goal for the Cherries.

If Potter and the recruitment team are able to bring in a striker, then Murray could find his chances to start games reduced. At this moment in time, that seems to be a pretty big if.

And there’s no guarantees that a new centre forward would be better than Murray anyway. We’ve been here before with Locadia and Andone.

In fact, trying to replace Murray seems to have been a running theme of his Brighton career. Gus Poyet was the biggest guilty party, allowing Murray to leave on a free in favour of buying Craig Mackail-Smith for £2.5m.

Had Poyet kept Murray in the first place, then he’d have taken Cook’s record long ago. We wouldn’t even need this debate. And that’s why Murray deserves to be Brighton’s record scorer – because of the five seasons which Poyet’s decision making denied us of.

Hopefully, he gets there this year.