How Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Leeds United just might work
An experienced Premier League striker who has scored two consecutive seasons in double figures and played and scored for England, who just needs to stay fit and recover the form he showed under Carlo Ancelotti for the next few years to become the prime of his career — and he's free?
One of the upsides of Dominic Calvert-Lewin is that his name comes with a catchy acronym: DCL. It's a shame it's so close to ACL, ha ha ha. Actually it's hamstrings that have caused him the supreme bother in the last four years so that gag doesn't work, and it's his hamstrings that eventually made him available to Leeds United this summer on a free transfer. We'll soon find out who is laughing about that.
In the meantime I have a funny feeling that I manifested this. Amid the tension of last season's promotion race, I suggested enjoying our two years of winning football in the Championship while we could, in case we succeeded, got promoted, and started enduring something like Everton taking five years to win as many games as we had in two. I also mentioned that only one Everton player had scored as many as Joel Piroe in a season in the last eight years, guess who that was. And just the other week, after watching Leeds playing Villarreal and fearing again a lack of fun in our future, I raised the spectre of becoming: '...Everton. Perpetually lowly, Jack Harrison crossing high beyond Dominic Calvert-Lewin's fit stand-in forever, cycling between Allardyce, Dyche and Moyes.'
At no point during any of this did I expect Dominic Calvert-Lewin to be coming here. Probably neither did he, but I hope he's feeling as good about it as I now am, because this is so mad it just might work. The madnesses include things like his constant injuries, although he's played quite a bit over the last couple of seasons and reckons he was always trying to come back too soon to help the team avoid relegation at Goodison Park; he's also switched up his training from gym work to yoga to help his body. Dominic Calvert-Lewin, meet the Thorp Arch medical room, and I say that sincerely: perma-crocks like Sam 'Scrapheap' Byram, Junior Firpo, Manor Solomon and even Pat Bamford have enjoyed greater availability than for years in the last two seasons of Daniel Farke's management of, generally, a fairly injury free squad.
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The madnesses also include the four preceding Premier League seasons in which Calvert-Lewin has scored, unimpressively, five, two, seven and three. I'll deal briefly with my assertion that this is good, actually: there's a truism, especially at the bottom of the Premier League, that chances are so rare at the top level that strikers can't afford to miss them; a striker that scored every chance he got in the Premier League, though, would be paraded around in lavish circuses as some sort of terrifying freak (Erling Haaland comes closest). Spurs spent £55m on Dominic Solanke last season and he scored nine. Only five Premier League strikers last season got as many as twenty.
More important is that the Calvert-Lewin who scored thirteen in a season for Everton, then sixteen the next, can be salvaged from the wreckage of Dyche and Moyes. Sean Dyche had him fighting for high balls and running the channels, giving him through balls that gave him too much time to think in one-on-one situations he's never been good at. There were precious few crosses for him to do much with. Moyes did the same but with added, uh, Jack Harrison.
Now, compare that to how Carlo Ancelotti, the manager of his two good seasons, was setting Everton up. Ancelotti recognised his centre-forward's strengths straight away, and told him to stop running around all over the place and to focus his energy on the penalty area. Calvert-Lewin still says the best advice he ever had about anything was from Ancelotti: "Stay in the width of the eighteen yard box":
Everton play with Calvert-Lewin alone up front. Five midfielders sit behind him, squeezing the space out of the game, with width being provided by the two full-backs tearing down the flanks, released by the careful stewarding in the middle by the holding midfielders, Allan and Abdoulaye Doucoure. Crosses come in from the wings and, for it all to work, the system needs a striker in the middle to finish things off.
That sounds eerily similar to the Leeds United team I saw dinking tempting crosses high over Joel Piroe in pre-season. Wilf Gnonto and Dan James have been playing narrow either side of the striker this summer, linking with three of the many midfielders Leeds now have, to form five; Jayden Bogle and Gabriel Gudmundsson have been doing wide things from full-back. What our team likes — getting to the byline and sticking the ball in the six yard box — happens to be what Calvert-Lewin likes, too.
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