Billy Sharp ⭑ From A-Z since '92
Sometimes Billy Sharp looks like he has solved goalscoring, with the power to make himself inevitable in the right places at the right times. Although being in a Sheffield United shirt usually helped too.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
Billy Sharp embodies the simplicity and the mystery of scoring goals. He has scored so many because, from a young age, he has done two simple things that former striker Steve Claridge spotted while watching him play for Scunthorpe: positioned himself off the ball in the centre of the goal, and been first to anticipate the ball coming into the area. Combining those put him right place, right time, time after time.
The mystery of goalscoring is how often the right place and the right time doesn't get the goals. Positioning and anticipating don't put the ball in the net, and even to top strikers finishing can feel like a mystery. They can practice and rehearse and learn and make certain goals feel like second nature, but some days or weeks or months it dissolves like a magic that has left them, and they have to wait for it to return. Marcelo Bielsa used to talk about this at Leeds, how there was no training for finishing, only for how to get to the place where the finish is demanded.
Bielsa, apparently, was offered Billy Sharp to replace Eddie Nketiah in 2019/20, and it would have been a fascinating return. Sharp was not a success in his season at Leeds in 2014/15, but his career has been a sequence of loops that meant coming back better could never be ruled out. He's joined Sheffield United three times, Doncaster Rovers four times, been coached by Nigel Adkins at four different clubs. He orbited South Yorkshire like a rogue planet trying to escape gravity and get to the Premier League. What he needed, to get 22 Premier League goals on his record, was to go back down to earth in Sheffield, piling into an off licence after losing in League One when manager Chris Wilder told his players to drink off a defeat and cheer up. Never mind positioning and movement: "Billy's got bottle, he leads from the front and does exactly what his job is," said Wilder, "Basically, what every manager wants" — or most managers, anyway. At Southampton Mauricio Pochettino and Ronald Koeman had found no use for him, but it's likely Sharp hadn't much use for them, either. What he really needed, deep down, was to be back in the Steel City, getting called a 'fat little pig' by drunk former Wednesdayite Gary Madine.
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He did at least buck some Sheffield United trends by only playing in two games as a youngster under Neil Warnock, and not thriving in 44 games — just eleven goals — for Kevin Blackwell. In between he'd gone to Scunthorpe for £100,000 and found success partnering former Leeds trainee Andy Keogh (43 goals for Sharp, 20 for Keogh, from 72 games) and Leeds' goalscorer in waiting Jermaine Beckford (12 and 8, in 17 games), prompting his hometown, boyhood club to bring him back for £2m. Neither Bryan Robson or Blackwell could get the best from him that time, and a loan to Doncaster Rovers became a £1.15m move worth, to ambitious Donny, 40 goals in 82 games. It was a much better return than they got from El Hadji Diouf. Sharp's ambitions were bigger than Rovers, though, and in January 2012 he left them, to add nine goals to Southampton's promotion to the Premier League.
Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
In case that mention of Andy Keogh has got you hankering for more of him
It took a long time for Sharp to recover from the grand total of nineteen minutes Southampton gave him in the Premier League. He was loaned to Nottingham Forest, Reading and back to Doncaster without rediscovering his goalscoring touch, and when Leeds' new owner Massimo Cellino was kept composed long enough to buy out Sharp's contract and bring him to Elland Road, it was a mutual attempt at running repairs that did not much good to anyone, apart from quelling years of transfer rumours.