With a move heavily rumoured, how did the ex-Wigan frontman perform last season?
 |
| "Franco Di Santo? Him by 'ere" |
Following on from yesterday's blog where I had a look at Di Santo's performance in general over the last few seasons, let's now look a little closer at the Argentinian striker's game. With Lita and Moore both seemingly free to find another club, the Swans would be left with Bony, Michu and Rory Donnelly as the only registered forwards (and Michu's inclusion in that list would no doubt gall the Spaniard), so you'd hope that if he is to come in, he'd improve the overall calibre of our front-line.
Last season he played 35 games in the league (24 starts), scoring 5 goals and nabbing two assists. Not the most auspicious start for a striker, so let's move on. When I've been discussing the merits of Di Santo coming in with other Swansea fans, the general consensus has actually been more positive than I'd have imagined; he's clearly not your "out and out striker" and his ability to hold up play has been cited more than once as something which could be useful to the Swans - but do the stats support this? His pass completion is 72.8% (averaging 17.2 passes per game) which when compared with Luke Moore (79.9% completion and 10.2 passes per game) doesn't actually hold up that well. Pun not intended.
Furthermore, from 4 starts and 11 sub appearances Moore managed to grab 3 goals and 2 assists - is Di Santo really any better? The former Chelsea man is dispossessed 1.3 times per game and gives the ball away another 1.6 - Moore weighs in with 0.3 and 0.4 respectively so it would seem that the ball retention argument isn't actually that sound. Ok, Moore has a smaller amount of average game time but it shouldn't produce a disparity as marked as that displayed so far. He averages 1.9 shots per game, with his 5 goals coming from a total of 65 shots - far from clinical and that gives him a conversion rate of 13%.
He does manage 0.9 key passes per game, which is more than all but 5 Swansea players averaged last term (Ki, Pablo, Routledge, Michu & JDG), so he's clearly got an eye for a pass, but the problem seems to be holding on to the ball long enough to do anything with it, and when you consider he only attempts a dribble once every other game it doesn't seem he's even trying to do anything particularly spectacular. Defensively, 0.6 tackles per game dwarfs the 0.1 managed by Moore, but when you put it alongside the 1.3 managed by Michu it doesn't look that great. I remember Alan Shearer talking about goalscorers once, and he said "Scoring goals hurts", implying that you don't magically appear for tap-ins; you produce your own luck by busting a gut for 90 minutes every time you take the field.
All in all, not that encouraging really. As has often been the case with the Swans, however, judging a player based on performances at another club could well be fool-hardy. We're seeing more and more cases of "if the shoe fits" and Swansea seems to be turning into somewhere technical footballers can legitimately hope to revitalise their careers if they've seen them stutter elsewhere. Let's hope that, if he does make a switch to SA1, we'll be saying exactly that about Di Santo in a year's time.