Chris Cohen believes Lincoln City should have scored more goals this season and has backed the Imps to make more of the chances they’re creating.
City have scored once in their last two games, following a 3-1 home defeat to Birmingham City and a 1-0 loss at Watford on Tuesday. Prior to the Millwall draw, we’d failed to score more than a single goal in the Championship fixture.
Contrast that with Jack Moylan’s first-half hat-trick for Cardiff City against West Ham on Wednesday, which brought the question back into focus ahead of our trip to Queens Park Rangers. Have we found the unpredictability Moylan gave us last season?
“I think if you look at a lot of the stats, set pieces are probably somewhere you go quite quickly. The processes that George and Preecey put into place are amazing,” said Chris.
“The expected goals that we have this season aren’t too dissimilar to last year. We should be well ahead in terms of the amount of goals scored and it’s not quite fallen.
“Deji’s the obvious one who’s had lots of chances. The last two big chances he’s had, he’s done everything right, hit the target. One flicks off the keeper’s arm and doesn’t go in on Tuesday night. The other one, the keeper somehow makes a save with his left foot from point-blank range.”
Reeco Hackett shared City’s Golden Boot with Moylan last season after scoring 12 goals, and Cohen pointed to both Hackett and Ben House when talking about where the goals might come from now.
“We’ve just got to keep believing in our process and keep believing that things will come off a little bit more often. We’ve still got players. I know we had Jack last year who scored a lot of goals, but Reeco Hackett scored a lot of goals last year as well. Ben House has started this season scoring goals, plus many others.
“Some of the new players have shown in moments that they can be that magic for us. It might not look the same as Jack, it might be a little bit different, but we’ve just got to keep striving, keep pushing and understand that if we keep to our processes, if we keep believing in what we do, then the results will come, as they have done over the previous number of years.”
Of course, while Moylan is scoring for Cardiff, the question will keep being asked, but the truth is, Moylan didn’t score a hat-trick for us, and he’s thriving at Cardiff as they’re more set up to play to his strengths, whereas he was impressing in a team last season that, perhaps, wasn’t always playing his style of football.
Would he be bagging hat tricks for us? I’m not so sure, and while we do miss his spark, the cold, hard truth is a player of his quality, at this level, commands a wage we cannot pay within our sustainable structure. So, we have to hope that some of the existing squad are able to chip in, or we rediscover our touch from set pieces.
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