Player Focus: Typical Townsend's star continues to fall at Tottenham
There’s something slightly startling now about looking back to November last year and remembering how good Andros Townsend was in England’s final two World Cup qualifiers.
When England needed wins at the end of the series, he was the man who stepped up: he scored a vital third goal in the 4-1 win over Montenegro, firing in from outside the box just after Dejan Damjanovic’s goal had threatened a comeback, and then he buzzed with menace and purpose as England beat Poland 2-0. Yet on Sunday, when Tottenham Hotspur named three academy products for their Premier League game against Manchester United, it was hard not to feel that Townsend was the third of the three, somehow less exciting than Harry Kane and Ryan Mason, that he was getting a game largely because it’s Christmas and other players are exhausted.
His performance was typical of how his play has gone in the past year. He’s a player for the Vine generation, in that he does the same thing over and over again, something encapsulated by Barney Ronay’s cruelly accurate Tweet: “Do you think if Andros Townsend did play on the left wing he'd repeatedly drop his shoulder and run into the crowd?”
Last season, Townsend, at least after he’d scored that brilliant goal against Montenegro, seemed forever to be shooting hopelessly from long range. If you’d had to capture the essence of the declining days of Andre Villas-Boas’s tenure as Tottenham manager it would have been with a camera based in the press-box at White Hart Lane, looking over the shoulder of the manager as he crouched in his technical area as Townsend picked up the ball on the right, turned in field, ignored players breaking through the middle and hit a 25-yard shot either wide or into another defender.
The statistics show that the perception may be a little unfair: in fact Townsend last season averaged only 2.2 shots per game – fewer than 24 players in Premier League games. Then again, all of them scored at least four goals; Townsend managed only one. And there was a long period when Tottenham, despite struggling for results, had had more shots than any other side in the league: it wasn’t hard to attribute that to the Townsend Factor. So far had his star fallen that, just six months after his heroics in those final two qualifiers, Townsend may not even have made England’s World Cup squad; as it was, injury saved Roy Hodgson from a decision.
The game on Sunday was only Townsend’s second league start of the season, although he has made four substitute appearances (he started 12 and came on a further 13 times last) and played five times in the Europa League. It’s not a huge amount of evidence on which to make judgements, but it does seem he may have reined in that shooting tendency a little. This season he’s averaging just 1.5 shots per game in the league and, while that figure is 2.2 in the Europa League, that’s still down on the 2.8 shots per game he registered in the same competition last season.
This has been a problem throughout his career. Townsend has attempted 128 shots in Premier League and Europa League games, 116 of them from outside the box. He has scored only four goals. At some point, surely, somebody has to persuade him that shooting every time might not be the best option; he’s only managed three assists in his 61 senior appearances, a desperately low figure for a winger.
Yet other indicators are decent. 1.1 key passes per game over his career could be improved, but a pass completion rate of 86.3% is good. Again, though, you look at the fact that he has sent over just 0.6 crosses per game over his career (although the trend is upwards) and made 0.1 through-balls per game and wonder why, when he gets the ball in a promising position, he is three times more likely to shoot than attempt a pass into a dangerous area.
It may be an issue of ability, but those figures suggest that decision-making is the biggest problem. At 23, youth is ceasing to be an excuse, but then at 23, he could probably have done with making more than 26 Premier League starts. Inexperience is an excuse and that means Townsend needs game time to develop, which may mean he has to look for a loan this January.
Should Andros Townsend stay to fight for his place at Spurs or seek a loan move to reignite his career? Let us know in the comments below?