No one can criticise Rickie Lambert's goalscoring record for Saints, it speaks for itself, but to join the true elite he needs to hit that magic ton in the league.
I am not going to enter a debate into whether Rickie's goals are any less worthy than say Matthew Le Tissier's, because Rickie's were scored across three divisions whilst Le Tiss's were all top flight, a striker can only score in the division that he is playing in and for that matter Saints third leading league scorer Terry Paine also notched his across three divisions(four if we want to be pedantic and call div 3 & div 3 south two seperate leagues) and some great strikers for us like Derek Reeves and George O's Brien never played in the top flight.
But the true worth of a striker in my book is league goals, for the record the clubs top ten league scorers are as follows
Mick Channon 185
Matthew Le Tissier 161
Terry Paine 160
Bill Rawlings 156
George O'Brien 154
Derek Reeves 145
Eric Day 145
Ron Davies 134
Martin Chivers 97
Tommy Mulgrew 90 & Rickie Lambert 90
So there we have Rickie's place in the clubs league goalscoring charts at the moment joint 10th with Tommy Mulgrew of whom sadly most readers will now be saying "who" ?
So Rickie needs one more league goal to join the top ten greatest Saints scorers of all time undisputably and who is to say he wont do that within 24 hours of this article being written, with no disrespect to Tommy Mulgrew I for one certainly hope that he does.
But how far up that table can Rickie go ? sadly I dont think time is on his side with this, it would be nice to see him overtake Martin Chivers and certainly getting 7 goals in the last 10 games is a achievable albeit a very tall order, but after that scoring another 28 to overtake Ron Davies could mean Rickie needing to keep scoring for at least another two seasons, three if he also wants to overtake Eric Day.
But Rickie making that top ten is very special, this club has always liked its goalscorers, although younger fans would probably be surprised at how many of this top ten that they have never heard of, most would know Le Tiss, Channon and Paine, but how many would even associate the name Bill Rawlings with Saints.
But perhaps what sets Rickie out from the pack here and means that he can truly hold his head up in this exhalted company is how quickly he has notched his ton, leader Mick Channon took a total of around 14 seasons to hit his 185 although in fairness the first couple of years didnt see him play a lot due to Chivers and Davies being the main strikers, Rickie's goals to game ratio is better than all of his fellow top tenners.
The truth is that you have to be a special striker to hit a better than a goal per two games ratio in any era over a reasonable period of time.
Perhaps the biggest comparison to Lambert and indeed a player who does have a better goals per game ratio would be Charlie Wayman, his stay at Saints was brief, just under three years but in that time he like Lambert became a legend, even a quarter of a century after he had left the club youngsters like myself when exposing the talents of Mick Channon were told that he would never be another Wayman and the phrase "Up the middle for Charlie" was still in use in the 1990's at the Dell amongst those of a certain age whenever the team were struggling to score goals.
Wayman enjoyed his time at the Dell, but being a northerner his wife could never settle in the South and he reluctantly requested a move back to a club in the north, his contribution though was immense, he didnt get that magic ton of league goals, he did however play 100 league games and his 73 goals make him the most prolific scorer in that respect, if he had stayed at the Dell another season he would almost certainly have hit 100 goals for Saints.
But we digress, hopefully very quickly Rickie will push Tommy Mugrew back into 11th place and hopefully soon he will move up another place in overtaking Martin Chivers, however sadly as much as i would like to see it, I cant seem him getting any higher, for Rickie time is running out and to push himslef much higher in the top ten he would need a few more yearsat St Mary's, even notching 20 league goals a season a big ask in the top two divisions it would take him another three seasons to get anywhere near the top five and although not completely out of the question and Im sure most fans would love to see him do it, the odds arent great, however back in 2008 when we all sang "He'll take us to the Premier League Rickie Rickie" no one then actually believed that that dream would come true and that he would still be leading the line and scoring when we got there, so perhaps Super Rickie Lambert will go on scoring goals for Saints and making dreams come true !