We’re struggling for goals at Villa right now. In fact, we have been for a while. What we need, then, is a striker who can bang in 20 goals a season, right?

Well, it would be a good start to have a player capable of that feat, but a lack of goals is just a symptom of our problems, it’s not necessarily the cause. With the right opportunities, we may even already have that striker.

I half joked that we could have had Didier Drogba leading the line against Birmingham last Sunday and the result wouldn’t have been different. I’ll go further now and will be entirely serious: you could put Didier Drogba in our side all season and he wouldn’t rack up 20 if we don’t start carving out a greater number of opportunities.

One of the names that’s cropped up of late as a possible target for January is Roque Santa Cruz, a player so clearly surplus to requirements at Man City it’s painful.

Santa Cruz scored 19 league goals for Blackburn in 2007/08, a record bettered that year only by Cristiano Ronaldo (31), Emmanuel Adebayor (24) and Fernando Torres (24), given the extra factor of difficulty in achieving that record at Blackburn, surely he could be our 20-a-season man then?

Not so fast, he only scored four league goals the following year and his overall strike rate in the Premier League is 26 in 59 starts. He’s a one season wonder then! Rubbish!

As ever, you need to dive a little deeper to get a better picture.

2007/08

I had a look at all 19 of Santa Cruz’s league goals from 2007/08 and there are a few interesting points to consider.

Firstly, seven were set up by David Bentley who lead Blackburn’s assist table that season with 11. To put that another way; Bentley was the provider of 37% of Cruz’s goals and Cruz the finisher on 64% of Bentley’s assists. Something of a symbiotic relationship it seems.

Further, the next most prolific provider of finished chances at Blackburn that season was Cruz himself with seven, closely followed by David Dunn and Jason Roberts with six each.

Cruz’s strike stats were naturally pretty impressive in 2007/08 – he scored a goal on average every 168 minutes, he averaged 2.06 shots per game, his shooting accuracy was 60% and he scored with 42% of his on target shots.

That form didn’t continue into 2008/09, but did he become rubbish during the summer, or is there more to it than that?

2008/09

As you may well recall, David Bentley reportedly snubbed Villa Park in favour of White Hart Lane during the summer of 2008 and has barely been heard of since.

Without Bentley’s crossing ability, where would Blackburn find a supply line? It wasn’t David Dunn, he had his own injury problems and only started seven games without a single assist.

It was actually Morten Gamst Pedersen who lead the assist charts at Ewood Park with seven. The next best were Stephen Warnock and Christopher Samba with three each, if you can believe such a thing.

Santa Cruz missed much of the season with injury of course, but his statistics reveal that his attempt rate increased whilst his completion rate went down. It smacks a little of desperation, perhaps.

During ’08/09, Santa Cruz scored a league goal every 372 minutes, he averaged 2.30 shots per game with a shooting accuracy of just 37% and scored with only 29% of those shots on target.

He scored four goals, but if he’d replicated his scoring rate from 2007/08 he would have scored 8 or 9 during his 1,489 minutes on the pitch. Arguably half as effective then, but with the supply valve also not operating on 100%, what can be reasonably expected?

Brad Friedel

David Bentley wasn’t the only one heading for the exit door between the ’07/08 and ’08/09 seasons, we also managed to tempt Brad Friedel into coming to Villa Park and this may well have been as detrimental as any personnel change that season, if not more so.

You only have to look at Blackburn’s overall performance in the Premier League table to see the effect.

Yes, they scored 10 less goals in ’08/09 than the previous season, but they conceded 12 more, a 22 goal swing in goal difference which is why they placed where they did.

To put Brad Friedel’s contribution to ’07/08 into perspective, he made an astonishing 227 saves. His replacement, Paul Robinson, made just 86 the following season and Brad himself needed to make only 124 during his first season at Aston Villa.

That’s why Friedel is not just a game saver, he’s a game winner.

With Friedel and Bentley gone, Dunn and Santa Cruz injured, there wasn’t a great deal of hope then.

2009/10

Mark Hughes was obviously convinced of Santa Cruz’s quality and was willing to spend in excess of £17m of the Abu Dhabi Group’s money to bring him to Eastlands where it’s fair to say he’s been less than impressive and clearly hampered once again by long term injuries.

I didn’t intend to look at 2009/10 in any detail, there isn’t much to see, but then I remembered a data file I had from an unfinished season review project which contained information on every player in the Premier League last season.

I sorted the data by goal rate and would you believe it, Santa Cruz just happened to be right in there with John Carew and Gabby Agbonlahor. (Besides Santa Cruz, the other players between Carew and Gabby in the table were Yakubu, Chuka, Vela, Arshavin and Carlton Cole).

* “Efficiency” = goals per shots ratio, “Deadliness” = goals per shots on target ratio.

Santa Cruz may have made 19 appearance for City in 2009/10, but 13 of those were from the bench and he finished on the pitch in just two of the six games he started for a total of 638 minutes. Carew played 2,107 minutes last season and Gabby 3,081.

The bottom line

Under ideal conditions, a quality provider in midfield, a strong defensive back line keeping games alive, no injuries, Santa Cruz can score goals, that’s not up for debate, it’s proven, albeit three seasons ago.

The question is whether those conditions are repeatable at Aston Villa and at 29 years old, with a long history of injuries, that seems unlikely.

If conditions are not ideal for Santa Cruz then, as was the case at City last season, as it was at Blackburn the season before, he doesn’t seem to offer us much that we don’t already have.

However, it’s not impossible that he could remain injury free for a couple of seasons with the right treatment, he could thrive on the sort of delivery that Ash, Downing and Marc Albrighton serve up and could rack up an absolute hat full of goals at Villa.

But what we see here is that you can not simply look at a player at one team and be assured of what he will do if dropped into another one, it’s far more complicated than that and the 20-a-season striker at one place could be nothing of the sort somewhere else. In short; it’s something of a myth.

Ultimately, Villa’s problems lie in creating opportunities and Santa Cruz has also demonstrated that he’s no more able to score goals without supply than anyone else is. Ironically, the player we hope can be the creative force at Villa, Stephen Ireland, is also beginning to look like a one season wonder himself.

The prospect of Ireland and Santa Cruz recapturing their best form in a team supported by the likes of Ashley Young, Stewart Downing and Marc Albrighton is quite tasty though, I can’t deny. But is it likely?

The prospect of watching two talented players failing to live up to their potential is the very definition of frustration, but when there are no guarantees available in any case, will fortune not favour the brave?

That’s what the managers get paid the big bucks for.

[As always, all statistics in this post are based on league appearances only]