It was a goal that had Tim Sherwood manically sprinting down the touchline, re-energised Aston Villa and lifted Gabriel Agbonlahor up to 45th place on the all-time Premier League goalscorers’ list, level with Brian Deane and Chris Armstrong. Or, to look at it another way, one position higher than Eric Cantona.
The 71st top-flight goal of Agbonlahor’s career, and in particular the performance he produced during the first half of that crucial 2-1 win over West Bromwich Albion on Tuesday night, was like being taken on a trip down memory lane. Quick, direct and aggressive, this was the Agbonlahor of old, the centre-forward to whom Fabio Capello gave three England caps and Martin O’Neill described as a “priceless asset”.
Agbonlahor was unplayable – only not in the way that many Villa fans had imagined beforehand, when the consensus seemed to be that Tim Sherwood had made a serious error of judgment by starting with a forward who had failed to score in his previous 14 league games.
“Strangely excellent” would be one way of summing up Agbonlahor’s display against Albion. As well as scoring the opening goal he ran Joleon Lescott ragged, ought to have had a penalty when Ben Foster cleaned him out and he saw two efforts cleared off the line. All of that happened before half-time and when he was substituted eight minutes from time a standing ovation followed.
“I think it was appreciated by the fans the other night, they were singing his name, you can’t imagine how much players grow from that,” Sherwood, the Villa manager, said. “I’ve managed one of the hottest strikers in English football at the moment, Harry Kane, he had to win over them Tottenham fans.”
At times it was quite an ordeal for Lescott and it is safe to assume that the Albion defender will not relish the prospect of coming up against Agbonlahor again, when the two teams meet at Villa Park in an FA Cup quarter-final. “Joleon 10 years ago wouldn’t catch him. It’s nothing to do with age or players,” Sherwood said. “Gabby Agbonlahor is an extraordinarily quick player. Every game I’ve told him to play on the shoulder and look to get in behind, because once he gets in behind you, he’s hard to stop.”
His is a curious case in so many respects. Born in Erdington and picked up by Villa at the age of 14, he has never been viewed as a footballer blessed with natural talent – “The one thing that attracted us to him was his pace, he had absolutely nothing else,” Bryan Jones, Villa’s former academy director, told the Guardian in 2008 – yet this is his 10th season as a Premier League player and there are moments when he can be absolutely devastating. A stunning seven-minute hat-trick against Manchester City back in 2008 sticks in the mind.
He is part of the furniture at Villa Park and it will be a strange day when there is no Agbonlahor in the team photo. Given his debut under David O’Leary nine years ago this month, Agbonlahor has had more strike partners (17) over the years than Villa have scored league goals this season. Juan Pablo Ángel, Milan Baros, Luke Moore, Kevin Phillips, Chris Sutton, John Carew, Marlon Harewood, Nathan Delfouneso, Emile Heskey, Darren Bent, Andreas Weimann, Robbie Keane, Christian Benteke, Jordan Bowery, Nicklas Helenius, Grant Holt and Libor Kozak have all tried their luck with varying degrees of success and failure.
Agbonlahor is a survivor and yet it is hard not to look back over his career, in particular that period when he was in his early 20s, in and around the England squad, scoring 11 (2007-08), 12 (2008‑09) and 13 (2009-10) Premier League goals a season, and question what has happened since and why performances such as the one against West Bromwich have become the exception and not the norm.
One school of thought among those that know him well is that life has been too comfortable for too long for Villa’s longest-serving player and that the desire, hunger and determination to push on no longer burns inside. Agbonlahor has been loyal to Villa but also extremely well paid. The four-year contract he signed in 2010 was worth £60,000 a week. Why leave? And would Agbonlahor have got that lucrative deal he signed in September anywhere else?
Others highlight the fact that Agbonlahor is Villa through and through and point to mitigating factors behind his deteriorating goal return. It is certainly true that Villa have been in steady decline across the period when his goals have dried up – he has scored only 25 in the league in the past five seasons and nine of those came in 2012‑13. There is also a legitimate argument that any forward would have struggled to make a mark for so much of this season, when the football was dire under Lambert and chances at a premium.
Perhaps the biggest thing that can be said in defence of Agbonlahor’s form over the second half of his career is that he has spent far too long playing out of position since O’Neill left the club. Gérard Houllier, Alex McLeish and Paul Lambert all deployed Agbonlahor wide, where he never looks comfortable. He was arguably at his best for Villa back in the days when Carew was playing alongside him up front, in the same way that Christian Benteke did against West Bromwich.
“That strike partnership [Agbonlahor and Benteke], outside the top six clubs, they’ve got to be the best two,” Sherwood said. “But on paper it doesn’t make any difference, you have to go and prove it and go and do it. And it’s about this time when Gabby normally comes out and starts keeping this team in the league.”
The last comment was accompanied with a smile but has some substance. Two years ago, when Villa were mired in yet another relegation battle, Agbonlahor decided to turn it on and scored six in seven during the last nine games of the season to help them survive. What Sherwood and Agbonlahor would do for a repeat of that run now, with a couple of trips to Wembley thrown in.
