Javier Hernández and the underrated art of the clinical goalscorer

There are many things in football that are incredibly beautiful. Lionel Messi at full flow. A Dimitri Payet free-kick. Or, indeed, a simple toe poke, such as Ronaldinho’s against Chelsea back in 2005.

The list is long. We can marvel at warm-ups (Diego Maradona with Opus in the background is a classic ), crossfield passes or even sliding tackles. Not to mention nutmegs. Wonderful things.

But for some reason we seem to find it more difficult to appreciate a clinical goalscorer. Take Miroslav Klose, the Germany striker who announced his retirement from football this week to go into coaching. He scored goals throughout his career: an astonishing 71 in 137 games for Germany, beating Gerd Müller’s 40-year-old record in 2014 to become his country’s best marksman of all time.

He scored 121 times in the Bundesliga in 307 games for Kaiserslautern, Werder Bremen and Bayern Munich before adding another 55 goals in 139 appearances for Lazio in Serie A – an unstoppable, lanky goal machine who could be relied upon to win games week in, week out.

Yet for all the goals he will never be considered as one of the best in the world by the wider public. It seems a little bit harsh because, after all, goals are the most important thing in football, the one thing that actually decides who wins a game.

Klose’s achievements, however, has probably been undermined by the fact that his goals – or in fact his whole game – were not all that aesthetically pleasing. His goals were tap-ins, they were close-range headers – they were scrappy.

But to dismiss Klose’s goals as ugly is to ignore the beauty of a goalpoacher’s best attributes: finding space and anticipating where the ball will drop. Fewer and fewer players seem capable of appearing behind a defender’s back to knock in the ball from two yards.

There are exceptions of course and Javier Hernández, whose Bayer Leverkusen face Tottenham Hotspur at Wembley in the Champions League on Wednesday night, is one of those players who has a wonderful sense of being in the right place at the right time.

Hernández is in his second season at Leverkusen now and has scored 22 times in 36 league games. This season he already has seven from 13 games in all competitions. And every time you look at those stats you wonder what on earth possessed Manchester United to first loan him out to Real Madrid for the 2014-15 season and then sell him to Leverkusen the following summer. For £7.3m.

True, there were times when “Chicharito” was given a chance in United’s starting XI and did not impress but the overall figures from his time at Old Trafford are 59 goals in 156 games. That puts him in the top 10 of United strikers when it comes to goals per minutes in the league over the past 20 years. How José Mourinho could use a poacher with Hernández’s strike rate at the moment.

Is Hernández, too, a victim of football’s inability to appreciate natural goalscorers? Would he have thrived at Old Trafford if Sir Alex Ferguson, David Moyes or Louis van Gaal had given him an extended run in the team? His performances for Leverkusen suggest he would have done.

He arrives in London for the game against Spurs at Wembley as Leverkusen’s focal point in attack, a threat to Mauricio Pochettino’s hopes of making it through to the knockout phase. At Leverkusen he has finally found a home in Europe where he feels appreciated.

The Leverkusen sporting director, Rudi Völler, said after the Mexican’s hat-trick against Mainz in September that “he certainly doesn’t win every tackle but he has an incredible sense of where the ball will end up”. His team-mate, Kevin Volland, who joined from Hoffenheim in the summer, said: “I have never seen a player who is so good in front of goal.”

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That is not to say that the Leverkusen manager, Roger Schmidt, allows Hernández just to wait around in the opposition’s penalty area for the ball to drop. In the 2-2 draw against CSKA Moscow earlier this season Schmidt was furious with Hernández and Hakan Calhanoglu for not helping out defensively and hauled them both off at half-time.

But overall Schmidt could not be happier with his main goalscorer. “The goals are obviously important but he is a much more complete player than people think,” he has said. “He works hard for the team and he goes deep to pick up the ball and has really clever movement.”

Hernández, meanwhile, continues to work hard – and rely on his intuition. Asked in an excellent interview with Sports Illustrated how he knows where to run in the penalty area, he said: “If you’re inside the box and a cross is coming, sometimes you need, as we say in Spanish, to smell the intuition, to smell where the cross is going.”

“You play this sport in the mind, not only on the field,” he added. “On crosses, sometimes I make my move one or two seconds before the ball is coming because I’m trying to guess that the ball is coming there. It’s intuition. So I run. Sometimes the ball comes … sometimes not. But that intuition is working.”

Hernández, in fact, is a wonderful player to watch. Like Schmidt says, he makes the best possible runs to open up space for himself and for team-mates. Yet there are no fan-made compilations on YouTube of Hernández’s best runs or movements in the penalty area. Maybe there should be.