After an impressive run of 13 goals in 14 appearances for League Two highflyers Port Vale, LFW decided to take a check on striker Tom Pope in the Monday Night Football game with Oxford.
Tom Pope >>> 27 years old >>> 6ft 3ins, 11st 3lbs >>> 13 goals from 15 starts this season >>> Previously with Rotherham and Crewe
QPR know better than most the perils of picking up strikers from the Potteries based on a spate of decent form. Until the recent splurges the club record transfer fee paid out of Loftus Road stood at £2.3m for Stoke City 's Mike Sheron who'd scored 23 goals in 46 appearances in 1996/97 but promptly reverted back to the 11/12 goal a season striker he'd always been beforehand after moving to W12 – admittedly playing in a poor Rangers team.
Then in 2002 Ian Holloway hoped to supplement his Second Division QPR side by taken on veteran target man Brett Angell from Port Vale. He was available for free despite scoring seven goals in 15 games in an inferior Vale team. He started his QPR career by failing to score in a 0-0 draw at Luton where the hosts played for an hour with one man less and 40 minutes with nine men, then a 4-0 defeat at home to Cardiff, then a 3-0 set back at Notts County. Ten further appearances, and no goals, later he was ushered aside and retired from the professional game, remembered by the Loftus Road faithful as one of the club's worst ever players.
Even had the R's avoided the pitfalls of those two transfers, the idea of dipping down into the lower leagues to take a chance on a 27-year-old striker would normally be seen as foolhardy. Jordan Rhodes' ludicrous £8m transfer to Blackburn shows you're still likely to pay that English-player premium even if you're shopping below decks, and Jermain Beckford's failure at Everton demonstrates that even being an obvious class or two above the level you're playing at doesn't necessarily mean you have the ability, or more accurately in Beckford's case, the mentality and attitude to step up.
However, we could be about to see a re-birth for the old fashioned English centre forward, picked up from a provincial northern club and catapulted to stardom at one of the country's big names. Grant Holt, aged 30, bagged 17 goals in a debut Premier League season last year having started his career with Workington and Barrow, failed at Sheff Wed and Nottingham Forest , and played League Two football with Shrewsbury Town as recently as 2009. Those, like me, who believed this was something of a fluke, look like we're going to be made to eat our words by Rickie Lambert, making his Premier League debut this season aged 30 after a nomadic career through Macclesfield, Stockport, Rochdale and Bristol Rovers and boasting four goals from seven appearances in a poor Southampton team.
So it was with some interest that I sat down on Monday evening to watch Port Vale's Tom Pope – who looks like he could be the bastard love child of Lambert and Holt if nothing else. He's a lifelong Port Vale supporter apparently – a dying breed if ever I heard of one, never mind sell him on for profit perhaps they should have him stuffed and put in the reception of the main stand at Vale Park which remains unfinished more than a decade after construction began.
Pope came through the renowned system at Crewe, was initially released into non-league before being bought back, and tempted Rotherham to spend a sizeable £150,000 on him in 2009 before releasing him to Vale for nothing in 2011. He has not, it's fair to say, ever torn up any trees before but he made Rotherham pay for discarding him by scoring four in a 6-2 win against them earlier this season and says he is benefitting from his first fully-fit pre-season for three years.
As you would expect of a graduate from Crewe , he's technically decent. Two incidents in the first half against Oxford caught my eye. The first came when he received the ball with his back to goal 30 yards out and showed great awareness initially to touch it off first time for a team mate, good pace to peal away in behind his man to receive the second half of the one two, and then excellent technique to chip the goalkeeper from a bad angle and send the ball onto the top of the crossbar. I doubt he'd have tried it were he out of form – often best to judge how players respond to poor recent form than what they can do when their dander is up – but this was impressive nonetheless. As was his 70 yard injury-time run to make a tackle in his own penalty area – again, easy to do when winning 3-0 and in form, but worthy of note all the same.
Later he pulled a waist-high cross from the right down first time on his instep on the penalty spot, teeing himself up perfectly to swivel and strike a volley with his other foot only to see the ball taken off his boot by his striking partner Louis Dodds who hadn't read the intention. That's technique not usually seen in a player at this level and his whole performance reminded me of another lower league game I'd seen on an international weekend a few years back when Lambert took Peterborough United apart in a big Bristol Rovers win.
He scored as well – his 13th of the season – but given the absence of any resistance from Oxford at all and a lousy piece of goalkeeping as Ashley Vincent retrieved a lost cause from the byline and just stuck it into a dangerous area the only credit he can take for that is being in the correct place. Still, I liked a lot of what I saw of him here – his technique is sound and his thought process was a mile ahead of the Oxford players. He's a division below his true level on this evidence alone.
The sub-clauses to this are plentiful. Firstly, Port Vale are set up in the absolute ideal way to benefit Pope with Jennison Myrie-Williams playing on the right despite being left footed, and Vincent on the other with a similar fondness for cutting inside. It means that Vale are able to stretch teams width ways initially with pace and then funnel everything into Pope who seems to thrive picking the ball up 30 yards out with his back to goal and then spinning off in behind having laid the ball off. They also partner him attack with the limited but busy Dodds who is suitably hard working and pest-like to occupy one of the centre backs and prevent any doubling up on Pope.
In addition, when I saw him on Monday evening he was playing against a woeful Oxford side that has conceded 24 goals already this year – only third bottom Wimbledon and last placed Barnet (26) have conceded more. After a bright start to the season – four wins and a draw from the first five league games – they've lost six and drawn one of the next eight and conceded 20 goals in their last seven away games. They looked like a team coming to the end of the road with a long serving manager in this game – listless and resigned to defeat before it had even kicked off, lacking urgency and spirit after going behind, failing to even do the basics correctly. I'd have fancied myself for a goal.
And League Two is not a good division. It's not by accident that teams promoted from the Conference have a habit of roaring straight through the division – and I expect Fleetwood to follow Crawley in doing exactly that this season. Decades of one up-one down only recently extended to two has created a situation where there is a log jam of teams in the bottom half of League Two who should have been relegated long ago, and a load at the top of the Conference who could more than hold their own at the higher level. Port Vale went second with this win but the quality of the game was vastly inferior to the Cambridge v Dartford Conference game I found myself at over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
Plus, while Pope is playing well, scoring goals, and looked technically good on this evidence, his previous record of mediocrity must be a concern. He wouldn't be the first striker to bloom late in the day, but he'll need to produce over a far longer period of time to convince that he's not simply in decent form, playing for the team he supports while it's doing well and creating chances.
If he does that, he strikes me as the kind of player Crawley or Bournemouth might pay £100,000 or thereabouts for in January.
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Pictures – Action Images