Player Focus: Palace Attempt to Get the Best from Potentially Prolific Adebayor

The first time I saw Emmanuel Adebayor was in Cairo in 2006. He’d just joined Arsenal and had scored 11 goals as Togo qualified for the World Cup for the first time. Everybody wanted a look at this 21-year-old rising star, but he was mysteriously left out of Togo’s opening game of the 2006 Cup of Nations. As a group of British journalists waited in the car-park for the players to emerge, we became aware of a ruckus on the Togo team bus. Looking up, we saw Adebayor and the Togo manager Stephen Keshi being separated by other squad members.

In various ways, that’s been the pattern ever since. Immense promise, undermined by some set-back or other, a falling out with a coach, a loss of form, or personal tragedy. I was in Angola in 2010 when Adebayor cradled Togo’s press-officer, a friend of his, as he died following the gun attack on the team bus and I was in Nelspruit in 2013 when Togo qualified for the quarter-finals of the Cup of Nations and Adebayor paid moving tribute to those killed on the Cabinda border three years earlier.

I understand why fans get frustrated with the striker, and it’s hard to dispute that he tends to play better when there’s a contract at stake, but I confess my default setting with Adebayor is sympathy. He is, by an enormous margin, the most significant footballer his country has ever produced, and that has brought tremendous pressure, not just emotional but, as he made clear in a Facebook post last March, financial with family-members and hangers-on demanding he support them in increasingly extortionate ways.

None of which is necessarily of concern to Tottenham or Crystal Palace fans. The regularity with which he falls out with coaches suggests he can be extremely difficult to work with. At Spurs, Andre Villas-Boas reportedly lost patience with him when he refused to take off a beanie hat for a team meeting – something that was surely a final straw. Tim Sherwood rehabilitated him with some success, but Mauricio Pochettino decided very early he was more trouble than he was worth.

Given Pochettino’s desire to build a team for the long term, and the way his approach demands constant work-rate and reliability, that probably makes sense. But it also makes sense that Palace should want him. Whatever else may be true of Adebayor, the fact is that, on form, he remains an exceptional striker.

He’s now scored 97 goals in the Premier League, but that’s only part of it. Adebayor has always hailed Kanu as his idol and there are certain similarities between their styles of play. Both are tall and gangling, both decent in the air and far better on the ground than their physique might suggest.

Adebayor this season, for instance, is winning 3.3 aerial duels per game (admittedly that’s over just two starts and a sub appearance), but he has regularly averaged between 1.5 and 2.0 across his career. Across his career he’s also averaging 0.8 completed dribbles and 1.3 key passes per game and in his first season at Spurs (2011/12) he was one of only two players - along with former teammate Robin van Persie - to register double figures for both goals (17) and assists (10) in the Premier League. Palace, understandably, seem to be looking to play to his aerial strengths, but he can play on the ground as well. And he has already scored one goal.

It probably is the case that Adebayor hasn’t made the most out of his talents, that his tendency to fall out with managers has cost him. But as a short-term impact signing, he probably makes more sense for Palace than a player such as, say, Pato at Chelsea. He’s proven in the Premier League and at his best is very good indeed. It’s just a question of getting that out of him and maybe the best way to do that is to accept that he is what he is, to ignore the long term but to accept he is at his best in short bursts.

Do you think Adebayor will prove to be an astute signing by Crystal Palace? Let us know in the comments below

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