Just how good is Manchester United transfer target Liam Delap?
The Ipswich Town striker is holding up his end but his days at Portman Road are numbered
Liverpool losing to Fulham might have created the illusion of life in the Premier League title race but an illusion is all it is. Liverpool will win the title. Leicester City and Ipswich Town are going down with Southampton.
Ipswich were the promoted team most expected to go straight back down but they’re really the one of the three who will look back on this season with the biggest sense of regret.
Southampton have been atrocious. Leicester City followed the questionable decision to sack Steve Cooper with the obviously risky one to appoint Ruud van Nistelrooy, a managerial candidate who wasn’t impressive enough to interest Coventry City.
It’s been different for Ipswich. Where Leicester’s big choice sent them down a dead-end road, Ipswich will be relegated with a long list of little questions that amount to the single matter of whether, just maybe, they could have done more.
The Tractor Boys were promoted into the Premier League with a highly rated manager and a willingness to spend money. They made a bet on their Premier League survival and backed Kieran McKenna from start to finish.
For several months of this season, Ipswich were regarded as a team with at least the whiff of enough grit and quality to be in the battle with the likes of Everton, West Ham United and Wolverhampton Wanderers and leave Southampton and Leicester in the dirt.
Yet their underlying numbers never suggested that their position near the bottom was false.
Before they really started to fade out of the fight, their indicative performance statistics pointed to the probability of a team in the bottom two, never mind the bottom three, and they were neither over-performing them to the extent that you’d believe in their quality nor under-performed them to the degree that they were likely to improve.
They were where they were.
Of Ipswich’s not insignificant transfer outlay since promotion, a reported £20m was used to extricate Liam Delap from the loans and limbo of life as a 21-year-old English striker at Manchester City.
Delap, now 22, has been a bright spot in a gloomy season. He was their sharpest edge when they battled to some impressive draws early in the season.
City, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea have all been mentioned alongside his name but the glaring gap, the great big hole crying out for a proven Premier League scorer and the one most audibly linked with Delap as the solution, is the one at Manchester United.
There’s a lot to like about Liam Delap
Is that the best place for him? That’s a question for another day. But Delap is a capable finisher, albeit not completely polished. He will only get better with experience.
His goal against AFC Bournemouth at the start of April was a brilliant example of what he can do. He held the ball up on his own, fed Conor Townsend as he ran beyond him, moved towards the penalty spot, and leathered the ball into the net like it had insulted his family.
It was a fabulous goal and the strike itself was delivered with the kind of heft for which Delap is gaining an enviable reputation.
But there’s more to his finishing than power. Delap boasts a variety of techniques in scoring positions, deft and delicate as well as destructive, and has the striker’s instinct to back it up.
Some of that is natural ability, or at least a set of skills honed in early childhood. Some of it is top-level academy pedigree and Delap topped off a decade at Derby County with breakthrough years at City and important loans in the EFL that were more successful developmentally than they were in terms of scoring.
“[Delap] has definitely evolved his game and he is still growing, so his body has developed over the last 12 months and that has changed the focus a bit in terms of what he is capable of doing and how he can hurt the opposition,” McKenna told TNT Sports in January.
“I think he filled out and his body has developed a lot in the last 12 months, so he’s a different frame from the Liam that was playing for Hull at Portman Road probably 14 to 15 months ago. We were surprised how good he was back-to-goal, and we were surprised how strong he was back-to-goal.”
No striker is complete at 22 years of age but Delap has a lot of the attributes required to offer a glimpse into a hugely promising future. When Alan Shearer is beating the drum for you, you’ve probably got something.
He now has enough stature and strength to make him a handful of his own. In a different system or even as a lone striker with more aggressive runners around him, he should become even more difficult to defend against.
There’s no guarantee those criteria will be met if Old Trafford is indeed his destination in the summer.
Glowing in the dark
As much as the football nation has been impressed by Delap’s performances for Ipswich this season, there would be plenty of risk associated with a reported £40 million fee should United choose to make their move. That’s new number nine money.
Delap’s positional shift is measurable even beyond his heatmaps. Last season he crossed much more frequently and was involved in far fewer aerial duels. He’s won 49 and lost 61 of them this season, which represents a better success rate from many more duels.
He’s throwing his weight around too. That’s a must for an all-round centre forward in a team that doesn’t control games, and he’s committed 63 fouls in the Premier League in an Ipswich shirt. That’s more than any other player in the division.
The upshot of Delap’s rejigged role and adapted play is that he’s been given a platform to find his feet in front of goal too.
There are metrics that hint at his progress towards Premier League proficiency but don’t really prove it. 12 goals is no easy return in a team destined for relegation but it doesn’t put him in the league’s top ten scorers and there’s no irrefutable measure in his data that suggests he’s heading for greatness.
Nevertheless, Delap is scoring 0.47 goals for every 90 minutes played in the league this season, by far the best run rate of his senior career, and he’s scored three goals above expected (xG) to boot.
Take away the two penalties he’s taken and scored, and Delap’s non-penalty expected goals (npxG) is outstripped by his actual non-penalty goals scored. By this measure, too, he’s in the best form of his career.
Only eight players in the Premier League are outdoing his over-performance. Of those, only Chris Wood, Alexander Isak and Jørgen Strand Larsen are straight-up strikers.
Think back to that goal against Bournemouth, perhaps the best example of Delap as a player whose personal confidence is growing even as his team wilts.
He’s scored 0.38 goals for every shot on target this season, again better than any previous season. That’s the benefit of having both the stones and the chops to absolutely smack it.
Could Delap be a one-season wonder?
Players in general and strikers in particular can hit a good streak and even have a good season only for it to prove a one-off.
Nothing about Delap suggests that, but for all the promise of previous seasons, this is the only one that would have caught the eye of the sizeable rump of clubs keen to rescue him from relegation.
That he’s playing so well in a relegation team is in itself a reassuring factor but the step up to United, for the sake of argument, is a big one in so many different ways – not just the expected standard but the extra pressures and quirks that come with a broken behemoth.
Delap looks the part. He’s physical out of possession and has improved in front of goal. His hold-up play has really come on too – the eye test says that, even if the statistics don’t necessarily make it clear – and the question of how good he would be in a capable team will already be looming large for the recruitment teams at the top clubs.
One hopes the answer is that he’d get even better. He’s full of confidence and quality, and under McKenna he’s developed the profile of exactly the striker lots of teams above Ipswich crave.
If he can grow to fill out that profile, there will be a team getting a bargain in the summer transfer window even if they have to clear out the coffers to get him.
Delap will have a choice to make. He will have suitors of different shapes and sizes. At 22 and at this specific juncture in his career, his destination could define everything that comes later. It’s vital he makes the right decision.
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