Premier League team complete with two chosen strikers
The last three days have seen you voting to select two strikers for our best ever Burnley Premier League team and there were two clear winners to find the pair to complete the team.
Despite playing in our worst ever Premier League season for goals, Danny Ings, who scored eleven of our twenty-eight goals in the 2014/15 season, was by some distance the first of the strikers to claim a place in the team. He secured 39% of the vote.
That was his only season as a Burnley player in the Premier League; he left that summer and has gone on to add another 51 Premier League goals for Liverpool, Southampton and Aston Villa.
His best season came in 2019/20 when he scored 22 goals for Southampton; only Jamie Vardy with 23 scored more goals than him that season. He netted twelve in the following season, the third and, currently the most recent, time he has hit double figures.
Joining him in the team is Chris Wood who won 21% of the vote. Wood joined the Clarets from Leeds early in the 2017/18 season and went on to reach double figures in all four of his four full seasons at Burnley, his fourteen in 2019/20 being his best return. Last season was more disappointing. He’d scored just three before moving to Newcastle in January for whom he added just two more. When he left Burnley, he’d scored exactly fifty Premier League goals, one for Leicester and 49 for the Clarets.
Of the other twelve players in the vote, only three won a sizeable number of votes. Robbie Blake (15%) had just one Premier League season at Burnley, scoring twice, our first home and first away goals in the league. Sam Vokes (10%) scored the first of his seventeen Premier League goals for us against Liverpool in 2016/17 while Ashley Barnes (10%) is behind only Wood having scored 42 goals for us in the Premier League and the only player to have netted for us in seven Premier League seasons.
This has left us with a team of nine full internationals. Five of those have won caps for England to add to internationals from Belgium, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. Only Ben Mee and Dwight McNeil haven’t been capped at full international level but both have played for England Under-21s.
Every team needs substitutes and we have chosen a nine man bench made up of the players who came closest to winning a place in the team. There was some debate as to whether the bench should include as many as three strikers, and it does, although Robbie Blake can, if required, play wide, and then whether it should be two central and one wide midfielder or to include the extra wide player. Wade Elliott helped; he’s been included and can also play in the centre which has allowed us to go for two wide players.
Thanks to the many people who have voted during the last three weeks. The next team you see a voting poll, we’ll be asking you to select your man of the match from next week’s Huddersfield game.
The Team
Nick Pope
Kieran Trippier – James Tarkowski – Ben Mee – Stephen Ward
Scott Arfield – Steven Defour – Jack Cork – Dwight McNeil
Danny Ings – Chris Wood
Subs: Tom Heaton, Michael Keane, Charlie Taylor, Dean Marney, Ashley Westwood, Wade Elliott, Robbie Blake, Sam Vokes, Ashley Barnes
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