Alfredo Morelos wasn’t fully fit last night, given how little game time he has seen this season, and yet, he still showed exactly what we have been missing.
Antonio Colak has lead the line admirably, scoring important goals in the league and in Europe, however, despite his obvious work rate, he just isn’t at the same level.
You could argue that Colak maybe takes one of the three good chances that fell to the Colombian international, however, there are no guarantees that we would have been able to create them in the first place.
What Giovanni van Bronckhorst has been missing though, isn’t just his best striker, but the ability to even make a change in that position with a similar option, Colak was able to come off the bench and, at least, keep the Napoli defence honest even if we were clearly up against it with ten men. The gaffer clearly happy to have his talisman back:
“I have said already it was a very positive week for him. You can see already he’s been working hard. He did well, he was dangerous and could have scored in the first minute.
“You can see what he brings to the team. In this game we needed him to be a target man and hold the ball. In the first half, he played really well.
:I think he should have got some free-kicks in his favour with some of the physical battles he had to take with central defenders. He’s on another level than he was a couple of months ago.
“Antonio Colak is also performing well so in the number 9 position we have two players there who can give me what I want.”
This also means that, if we do need a goal, Gio can entertain playing both of them together, certainly in domestic football anyway. Morelos does a lot of his best work outside the box whilst Colak prefers to play on the last man, there is no reason why they can’t be tried together given how opposition teams set up.
The squad is starting to look a little stronger now that players are returning to fitness, Tom Lawrence is still a huge miss, as are Ianis Hagi and Kemar Roofe, but how Gio deploys his two main goal threats is going to be interesting in the coming weeks as he looks to get us back to winning ways.