SAM COSGROVE is something of an enigma. When the 22-year-old became Aberdeen's first-choice striker at the start of the 2018/19 season, he got off to a relatively slow start in the Granite City.
After scoring just twice (both against St Mirren) in his first 10 league games, it's fair to say that Cosgrove didn't exactly immediately win over the Pittodrie crowd immediately.
But then it all changed. Cosgrove grabbed the equaliser against Livingston in a 3-2 win for Derek McInnes' side, and it was as if a switch had been flicked. In the 11 matches that followed, the towering forward racked up 12 goals and a couple of assists.
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Then, another relatively barren run. From the game against St Johnstone in late February until the end of the season, Cosgrove only managed three goals in 12 league appearances. To be fair to the English striker, he did chip in with four goals as Aberdeen reached the semi-finals of the Scottish Cup last season, but only one of these - against Rangers at Pittodrie - arrived after the St Johnstone match.
This season, Cosgrove has 13 goals in 14 appearances in all competitions which sounds very impressive. But when we dig into the detail, it is perhaps a little less so.
Of the 13 goals to his name this season, seven have came via the penalty spot. Now, obviously, these still need to be converted and Cosgrove deserves credit for doing so. But being an effective penalty taker does not necessarily make a good striker. It's undoubtedly a bonus but it is simply not an indicator of how good a striker a player is. Look at Rangers captain James Tavernier, who was one of the league's top scorers last season and almost all of his goals were penalties. No-one would claim that Tavernier is a natural finisher, or suggest that he would be an effective striker because of his penalty prowess.
It might sound flippant, but there is an asterisk attached to Cosgrove's goal return this season because of this. The striker's last goal from open play was against James McPake's struggling Dundee side in the League Cup, and Cosgrove has just one league goal from open play this season. In 492 minutes of Premiership action this campaign, Cosgrove has managed just nine shots - and three of those were penalties.
To be fair to Cosgrove, this is the result of a deeper, more worrying issue with McInnes' team. After seven fixtures, only Hamilton have attempted fewer shots in the top flight. Motherwell have hit almost twice as many. There is a chronic lack of service to Aberdeen's striker so a degree of mitigation is required, but six shots from open play from nearly 500 minutes is a truly woeful return that no striker would be happy about.
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It seems bizarre and counter-intuitive but for a striker with 13 goals in 14 games this season - and one who was only a goal away from being the joint-top scorer in the Premiership last season - Cosgrove's goal return isn't actually all that impressive. Even during his aforementioned run last season, three of his 11 goals were penalties.
What this all points to is a striker who, in truth, has had one excellent run of games in his career where he was scoring goals from open play. Before moving to Pittodrie, Cosgrove had scored just one senior goal in 32 games in spells at Wigan, Barrow, North Ferribry United and Carlisle. Before hitting his rich vein of form last season he struggled to find the net and from March onwards, goals from open play were hard to come by in the Premiership.
That brilliant run last season is the exception to Cosgrove's form, generally speaking, and is an outlier over the course of his career. He hasn't managed a similar run before or since and unless something fundamentally changes to Aberdeen's attacking approach this season, there is little to suggest that Cosgrove will be able to recapture the form that made everyone sit up and take notice last season. It sounds incongruous but for a player with so many goals, Cosgrove isn't a particularly good goalscorer.
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