It’s about the way Manning sets his team up. He plays a lone striker regardless of the formation but doesn’t use them as a poacher or out and out goalscorer. In the 21/22 season his top scorer was Twine, an attacking midfielder, with 20. He was on all set pieces and was the best player in the division by a country mile. After that it was Mo Eisa with 12 - nobody else got into double figures - followed by Troy Parrott with 8 (plus seven assists). Eisa is your on-the-shoulder type and Parrott is your six-foot-plus link man.
We’ve got Harris in the Eisa role, so now we need a different, more physical player to be able to switch things up based on how he sets his teams up. O’Donkor is that sort of player but isn’t good enough (yet), and Perkins is 6’1” and ticks the right box but has clearly eaten somebody’s pasta. I was told by someone who should very much know that the Marriott interest was much earlier in the summer from us, and was long gone while the press was still saying we were in for him as deadline approached. Meanwhile we signed Perkins having been interested in Cosgrove around the same time (who is absolutely flopping at Barnsley thus far), so it seems the criteria was indeed an Eisa and a Parrott.
Smith scored 13 goals in 45 League One games for a team that almost got relegated - more than Eisa scored in the MK side that amassed 89 points the season before. He’s physically strong and a hard worker, holds the ball well and is capable of scoring a respectable amount of goals while linking play. A good friend of mine is a ST holder (handy for parking when we play there) and I gave him some stick when he turned up there given his loan with us was a stinker, but he was absolutely loved and did extremely well playing for a regularly struggling side.
Were there many better options than him available? Charles, Bishop, Cole etc are all at other (bigger) L1 clubs already, so they’re out of the question because none of them are selling to us and their fees will be in the millions. Cosgrove? Flopping. Watters? Flopping. Nombe? Absolutely unobtainable - went up to a Championship club for his club’s record fee. Imagine the scene if Rhodes had rocked up at 33 with that recent scoring record. Christ alive, people would’ve moaned for weeks. Anyone claiming he was what was needed or who they wanted is indulging in some
hefty revisionism. Ditto Waghorn and Chris Martin. “I thought we’d moved past these kind of has beens now that Robinson has left!” etc.
Looking at the current L1 top scorer list - Reid from Stevenage? Hoskins from Northampton? Don’t think they’re going to stop the #GoingForIt goading if they show up. After that you’re left with all the players already named above, who are not affordable or being sold to us.
Then you look at last season’s top scorer list. Who could we have got who is clearly better than Smith?
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From the looks of it - McGoldrick and May. That’s about it. McGoldrick wanted to go back home to Notts County to play out his final season or two, and May is on record as saying he only wanted Charlton, as he’s from the area and all his family (Charlton fans) are there. Clarke-Harris maybe? On paper the ultimate L1 goal machine. Does he fit what Manning wants from his strikers, given he talks about wanting team players and for goals to be spread around the side? Dunno.
Beyond that, we offered Fleetwood double what they paid for Marriott six months earlier and they said no, and nobody else got him either. This talk of a lack of ambition or Fleetwood being a basket case is wide of the mark. He’s still there - they don’t need to sell. We tried. He would've been one of our most expensive signings ever.
Looking around L1 as a whole, hardly anybody has signed a striker in the summer who is ripping it up, whether they be established L1 performers, signings from lower divisions, or kids on loan from higher up. Rhodes and May are the only ones. Everyone else was already at their club and won’t be sold to any club below the Championship, or in the cases of Hoskins and Reid are having an Indian summer. I think it’s pretty clear that there was not a plethora of options across the entire league this summer, and certainly not a great many better than someone like Smith.
