Wood is third ten goal Claret in Premier League
After a hugely successful season, we can now looking forward to a third successive season and a fifth season in total in the Premier League, and the 2017/18 season, which ended three days ago, saw a third Burnley player hit ten goals or more in a season.
The 2009/10 season saw us play in the Premier League for the first time yet, despite at times playing gung ho football, no player reached the magical figure of double figures. Steven Fletcher came closest. He scored eight times although six of those came in defeats.
His first league goal for us came in a 2-1 home win against Birmingham although it could be said their loan goalkeeper Joe Hart might have dealt with it better, and he scored the second in that fantastic 3-3 draw against Manchester City on our first ever visit to the Etihad.
Graham Alexander came next that season; he scored seven times, albeit all but one of them were from the penalty spot, with four of those goals all scored against Hull. And David Nugent, on loan from Portsmouth, netted six times. Only one of those goals came in a defeat.
So we were still looking for our first double figure goalscorer and that wait lasted a further five years when Danny Ings became the first to hit ten, in fact he went one better with 11 goals in the 2014/15 season.
In a season that yielded just three points more than the 2009/10 season, his goals were certainly important in terms of winning points; five of them came in victories with another three in draws. Back in the 2009/10 season, we won only one away game. This time we recorded three successes on the road, beating Stoke 2-1 and ending the season with 1-0 wins at Hull and Aston Villa. Ings scored all four of those goals, the one at Villa proving to be his final Burnley goal prior to his move to Liverpool.
Ings and Sam Vokes had both gone past twenty in the previous season when we finished second to Leicester in the Championship. Unfortunately Vokes missed most of that Premier League season because of injury so his first goal in the top flight didn’t come until August 2016 when he scored the first in a 2-0 win against Liverpool.
He’d now formed a strike partnership with Andre Gray and they both scored that day. By the time the season was drawing to a close and Burnley were looking more than likely survivors, Gray was the favourite to win the club’s golden boot. When he scored our second at Crystal Palace, he’d scored nine with three games to go; Vokes was only on six. Gray didn’t score again for Burnley; Vokes netted the remaining four goals that season to join Ings in the double figure group.
That partnership was dissolved last summer. Gray moved on to little mix it at Watford while Vokes, who scored twice at Chelsea on the opening day of the season, started just seven games and added only two more goals, those at Southampton and Watford.
The goalscoring threat this time came from Ashley Barnes and new signing Chris Wood and they had their own personal battle to become top goalscorer. A ten goal season for either of them didn’t look likely when we went into the home game against Southampton on the last Saturday in February. At the time, Wood had scored four times; Barnes had just three. Wood was missing for the ninth successive game through injury and Barnes scored our goal in a 1-1 draw to level things.
But it was Wood who made it to double figures with his goal last Sunday against Bournemouth and he also becomes the first Burnley player to score ten or more goals in a Premier League season without the aid of penalties.
Barnes, however, leads one Burnley goalscoring table in the Premier League. His final goal of the season in that draw at Stoke was his 20th Premier League goal and he sits six ahead of Vokes who is in second place with 14. Barnes is also one of only two Burnley players to have scored goals in three different Premier League seasons; the other being Scott Arfield.
Will we have another player reaching double figures next season? Will Barnes make it? Will Wood or Vokes achieve it for a second time? Or could there be a new striker who makes his mark in front of goal?
Follow UpTheClarets:
Share this page :