All logic dictates that Peter Crouch should not have had a
particularly successful career. That is not to say he lacks talent – as the old
and tired maxim goes, “he’s got good feet for a big man” – but he entered
football at almost precisely the same time as the traditional target man began
to go out of fashion at the top level. This has been borne out by the
journeyman nature of his time in football: no team has ever wanted to commit to
building around a striker in Crouch’s mould, and he has duly been shunted from
club to club. However, he has been successful everywhere he has gone. It is
telling that he has enjoyed multiple stints at a lot of his clubs, most notably
Portsmouth and Tottenham; the grass is not often greener when Crouch is disposed
of. Stoke City is the only club where he has made a century of appearances, and
yet he is loved by fans of each team he has graced: his cult status was truly
cemented when he entered the exclusive list of players to reach 100 Premier
League goals.
Even from his academy days, Peter Crouch had to get used to
being moved around. From ages 10-12 he was enrolled in Brentford’s setup,
before moving on to QPR and then, at the age of 14, Tottenham. However, the
regular moves then were not based on a dislike of his style: he was simply a
sought-after talent. The switch to the Tottenham academy took place in 1995 –
the role of target man still very much had a place in English football, and to
find a player with Crouch’s combination of physical attributes and technical
ability was considered hitting the jackpot. It was therefore unsurprising when,
after three years in the academy system, Crouch was handed his first
professional contract by Spurs. However, at this point Crouch got his first
taste of the struggles he would have to fight to overcome throughout his
career. By this time he had grown to a staggering 6”7, and to be frank it made
him seem like little more than a novelty option: a potential ‘Plan B’, perhaps,
but with no real place in a top side. Certainly this was the perception amongst
the Tottenham hierarchy: he was unable to get anywhere near the first team
between 1998 and 2000, and in 2000/01 was shipped out on loan to Dulwich Hamlet
and IFK Hässleholm consecutively. Even at these lowly clubs he was, to an
extent, shunned: he made a combined total of 14 appearances for the two sides.
Conny Olsen, coach of Hässleholm at the time, recalls an incident from Crouch’s
stint at the club – he had been put into the reserves after just one
appearance, and the opponents, Häcken, were laughing at the bizarre spectacle
of this giant of an Englishman plying his trade in a Swedish reserve fixture.
They were not laughing for long. Crouch netted five goals against them, and was
soon in and around the first team a little more. He ended his time there with a
respectable three goals in eight appearances.
This was not enough for his parent club: following his return
from loan he was immediately sold to his former youth team Queen’s Park
Rangers, having not made a single appearance for Spurs. QPR were in the
equivalent of the Championship at the time, and yet the man who couldn’t get
regular minutes at Dulwich Hamlet was immediately catapulted into the first
team. Finally, Crouch was at a club which was willing to put faith in him. He
duly delivered, with the steady consistency that has seen him notch up 100
Premier League goals without ever being immensely prolific. He reached double
figures in the league, scoring ten goals in his 42 appearances, and bagged two
in three in the FA Cup. His performances caught the eye of fellow Division One
side Portsmouth, whom he moved to for the 2001/02 season following QPR’s
relegation and financial troubles. Here he enhanced his reputation still
further, improving on his tally of the previous season to score eighteen goals
in just thirty-seven matches. This would be quite a tally for anyone, let alone
a 21-year-old at a side that went on to finish the season in 17th.
With the world seemingly at his feet just two years after being forced to ply
his trade in Sweden’s reserve leagues, Crouch made the step up to the Premier
League with Aston Villa.
At this point, things stopped going quite so smoothly.
Crouch, having not been afforded any first team opportunities at Tottenham as a
teenager, was not used to the top flight – he initially struggled to make the
transition. This was severely exacerbated by his lack of regular football: once
again he faced a lack of faith to overcome. He was afforded a fair amount of
minutes in the immediate aftermath of the four-million-pound deal, making seven
appearances and scoring a respectable two goals in the latter half of 2001/02.
This included a strike on his home debut. However, in his first full season,
Crouch was limited to just fourteen appearances: the lack of consistent game
time affected him badly, and he failed to score a single goal. He rightly took
some criticism for the poor spell, and has since admitted that he was simply
not ready for the Premier League at the time. Nonetheless, Graham Taylor’s
Villa could undoubtedly have done more to help. In 2003/04 Crouch was sent to
Norwich on loan; he performed well there and managed four goals in his
three-month spell, but the writing was on the wall for him at Villa Park. After
making just one more appearance for them he was sold to Southampton at a
two-million-pound loss for the start of the 2004/05 campaign.
This was the time where Crouch, now twenty-three, truly began
to make a name for himself in the Premier League. Prior to his season at the
Saints he was relatively well-known because of his height – by the end of the
campaign he would be known for his attacking abilities. At first, it didn’t
look as though Crouch was going to get such a change in fortunes – up until
about Christmas time he continued to struggle for minutes. In the meantime,
Southampton dispensed of not one but two managers: so began one of the defining
relationships of Crouch’s career, his link-up with Harry Redknapp. Under
Redknapp’s tutelage, Crouch thrived. Despite his slow start he ended the
Premier League season on double figures, racking up 12 goals. He was also
crucial in the Saints’ FA Cup run, scoring four times in five games to help the
team to the quarter-finals. This included a 94th minute winner from
the spot in the 4th round against his old club Portsmouth. This
latter-season form prompted yet another move: Crouch’s performances had not
been enough to prevent Southampton finishing bottom of the table (although they
ended just two points adrift of safety), so he gratefully accepted the offer
from newly-crowned European champions Liverpool. This was without a doubt the
biggest step in Crouch’s career, and there was some scepticism amongst the
Liverpool fans regarding the signing. Yet again Crouch worked to displace the
doubts, and his performances over the following three seasons won over the vast
majority of fans: to this day he is remembered fondly by the Anfield faithful.
As is the story of Crouch’s career, it was far from an easy start.
It took eighteen games before he finally scored – at this point he was
understandably regarded as a flop. Particularly with Crouch, any bad patch of
form leads to criticisms about his style: many questioned why Liverpool had
decided to recruit this kind of old-school target man. Somehow, however, he
clawed his way back from the brink – one year on from when he finally broke his
duck, not a single fan would have dared question the technical aspect of
Crouch’s game. On the 27th September 2006, he scored a goal that has
gone down in Liverpool folklore: a stunning overhead kick against Galatasaray
in a 3-2 victory. It was this Champions League campaign that Crouch is
remembered most fondly for on Merseyside; he scored a further six goals in a
run that saw Liverpool reach the final of the tournament. His league form was
never quite what it had been at Southampton, with Crouch repeatedly just
missing out on the double-figures target, but he certainly put in some
memorable performances. Chief amongst these was a perfect hat-trick in a 4-1
win over Arsenal in 2007. When he parted ways with the club at the end of the
2007/08 campaign he did so with a solid 22 league goals to his name and, more
importantly, with the respect of the fans.
Crouch left Anfield for his old haunt, Fratton Park, where he
linked up with former boss Harry Redknapp. There was a rumoured
eleven-million-pound price tag on his shoulders, but Crouch had learned from
his Liverpool experience and showed no indications of pressure. He scored on his
third league game, against his old club’s local rivals Everton, and continued
to score at the steady rate of around 1 in 3 for the rest of the season. It was
at this time when Portsmouth’s financial crisis was coming to a head, so
circumstances once again forced Crouch to move on – he was one of many players
sold for big money fees in the summer. This opened the door for a return to
another former club, Tottenham: 11 years after he signed his first professional
contract at White Hart Lane, he finally made his debut. Who else should give it
to him but friend and mentor Harry Redknapp: their third partnership was
perhaps not quite as successful as the previous two, but Crouch by no means did
badly during his spell at Tottenham. Again, it was Europe where he thrived.
Having scored the goal against City to confirm Champions League qualification
at the end of 2009/10, he then spearheaded a remarkable campaign that saw the
London club reach the quarter-finals. He scored a hat-trick to help overcome
Young Boys in the qualification round, notched in both games against Werder
Bremen, turned home a Bale cross against Inter Milan and then scored versus the
other Milan club to take Tottenham into an unlikely quarter-final clash against
Real Madrid. Sadly he got sent off in that fixture, which slightly soured the
memory of his contribution to the campaign, but Crouch is nonetheless regarded
as a cult hero amongst Spurs fans.
Crouch left the club at the start of 2011/12: at the age of
30 he was no longer able to stake a claim for regular football at Spurs, so he
made the move to Stoke City. By this time his international career was over –
starting around the time he joined Liverpool and ending shortly after the 2010
World Cup, the big striker’s time on the world stage is something of an enigma.
His minutes-per-goal for England is, astoundingly, below 100, yet he never
cemented himself as a first choice striker: the target-man snobbery was perhaps
more pronounced in the international setup than it was anywhere else. That said,
Crouch could look back with fondness over his time with England by the time he
moved to Stoke. At the Brittania, he made people question exactly why Spurs and
England had deemed him surplus to requirements: he reached double figures in a
league campaign for the first time since his second spell at Portsmouth. The
ten goals were scored over an impressive 32 matches – clearly, the issue was
not Crouch’s fitness. Indeed, Crouch’s game time was even higher for the next
three seasons: he managed 34 games in 2012/13 and 2013/14, and 33 as recently
as 2014/15. Those three campaigns saw a useful combined return of twenty-three
goals, taking his personal tally in the top flight to 96 goals. Following
2015/16, however, it looked as though a great career might end agonisingly
short of the century landmark: the likes of Mame Biram Diouf, Jonathan Walters
and Joselu severely limited the Englishman’s game time, and he failed to add a
single goal to the tally.
Thankfully, however, in a career of peaks and troughs Crouch
is managing to end on a high. Stoke’s poor start to the season prompted Mark
Hughes to look to his big man, and Crouch has shown the world that he’s still
got it. Following his reintroduction to the side the goal-counter ticked
agonisingly nearer to 100, until finally he got what he was looking for in a
1-1 draw with Everton on the first of February. Fittingly, Crouch dusted down
the old ‘robot’ celebration to mark the occasion. Fans of every club he has
played for throughout the years no doubt stood up to applaud the achievement:
it is no more than he deserves. 48 of the goals came with his head, with the
remaining 52 ranging from tap-ins to stunning bicycle kicks. Not bad feet for a
big man.
-James Martin
Follow me on Twitter @JamesMartin013
Follow me on Twitter @JamesMartin013
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