Edinson Cavani, Lewandowski and Torres: Chelsea's striker dilemma

Most of us are sick of talking about it, but let’s do it some more anyway. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, it’s pretty clear cut that Chelsea need to invest in a top class striker this summer. I feared last year that putting all our eggs into the “Torres will come good” basket was a risky strategy, and ultimately, that fear was proven correct.

His goal return wasn’t a bad one by any means, 22 goals in 64 games looks pretty reasonable on paper. The problem is that you can count the really crucial ones on one hand. It’s all well and good scoring the 5th goal in a 5-1 win at Leeds, or the 4th in a 6-0 win at home against Wolves, but it’s the big names that step up in the big games (read Drogba, Didier).

The senior management at the club didn’t help matters. I find it hard to believe that Roberto Di Matteo was happy about going into an entire season with one striker. A striker that had failed to live up to the billing in his first 18 months at the club. There was of course Daniel Sturridge, who in my opinion should have been given more opportunities. However it was fairly obvious that neither club nor manager saw him as an out and out striker.

Torres started relatively well, but that quickly disintegrated into the poor form we’d come to expect. Several barren runs in front of goal and some real horror performances followed. The powers that be tried to rectify this in January with the sale of Sturridge and purchase of Demba Ba. Again, he started well, but again it soon petered out into sluggishness mixed with goal droughts. In truth, he was never going to be anything more than a stop gap for the remainder of the season.

This year needs to be different. The likes of Oscar, Juan Mata and Eden Hazard deserve to be supplying top class talent week in, week out. I’m all for the club’s strategy in buying younger players for smaller fees, but in this position, I really believe we need to be looking at the elite. You only need to look over at Manchester United for proof of that. They bought the best striker in the Premier League, despite his age and injury concerns, and he’d effectively wrapped up the league for them several months before the end of the season.