Manchester City’s crucial 1-0 win at Ewood Park deepened Blackburn Rovers’ relegation concerns, but it brought huge relief for big-money signing Edin Dzeko. The Bosnian, in slotting home the 75th-minute winner, scored his first Premier League goal since joining for £27,000,000 in January, and while the BBC have unfairly headlined Phil McNulty’s blog to suggest Dzeko has justified Roberto Mancini’s faith in him, I’m not so sure one goal makes up for months of misfiring.
How many goals, for example, would the maligned Robinho have managed during that spell given the same opportunities as Dzeko? His transfer fee, his reputation and his fearsome goalscoring record in the Bundi with Wolfsburg prompted assumptions that the striker was the ‘last piece in the jigsaw’ for City, the completion of a formidable line-up that already boasted goals in Carlos Tévez. Dzeko’s slow start was forgiven while the Argentine was still in the habit of dragging Mancini’s side to victories, but in Tévez’s recent absence Dzeko has not escaped criticism in his first season in English football, even if it doesn’t come close to the invective aimed towards the Brazilian now at AC Milan.
I was particularly struck by his performance in the recent 3-0 drubbing by Liverpool. Watching Dzeko labour fruitlessly up front, for City fans, must not have been unlike watching Barry Conlon or Lee Bradbury slog it out in the old Division Two. He really was that bad, the issue of his complete lack of mobility being almost overshadowed by how poor his touch and distribution was when he did manage to encounter the football.
As we’ve seen with Fernando Torres, a player who has proved he most certainly can cut it in the Premier League, a lack of confidence can be the undoing of the greatest of strikers. Dzeko’s winner at Ewood may yet see him finish the season strongly, but don’t think that one winning goal has done anything like justify his signing, considering how ineffectual he has been up to this point. City might already be home and hosed in the Champions League spots if they’d fielded someone else in Dzeko’s place since January.
