For a long time I have had a love-hate relationship with our forward David McGoldrick. He has all the skills in the world but is sometimes woefully wasteful with them.
A good example of his Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde football appraoch was personified last Saturday at Portman Road.
One moment he was delivering a careless pass to the opposition and then the next he was gliding past defenders as if they did not exist.
Until he laid on the first goal and scored the second himself, I was of the view that he was having a poor game because although he largely engineers a lot of the chances himself, he is extraordinarily profligate for a so-called seasoned striker.
The argument that is often made in his defence is that because our midfield is so poor at creating anything at the moment, he has to fetch and carry – or go back searching for the ball because the service up to him is so wanting.
This is a valid defence but it does not tell the whole story. Far too often he tries to score from ridiculous angles when there are players better placed, or he misses gilt edge chances that a player of his quality should be burying time and time again.
In a nutshell then, he is a player that frustrates me massively at times and yet we cannot do without him. His inventiveness is the reason why we create so many goalscoring opportunities but I just wish he could learn to make the right choices.
There are real signs though that he is finding his form of old and if this is indeed the case, then there is every hope that as the season progresses he will become sharper in front of goal.
Certainly the goal he scored last saturday was of real quality and although he will probably always remain an endless enigma, he is, nevertheless, one of the few players at manager Mick McCarthy’s disposal with genuine class.
Frank Weston – Editor of Vital Ipswich
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