Striking case for two goalscorers

On Soccer: The news yesterday that Bohemians are trying to persuade the league to credit Glen Crowe with a goal they believe to have been mistakenly attributed to a team-mate in May seems to support the suspicion this championship race is as much a head-to-head between the league's top two strikers as it is a showdown involving its leading clubs, writes Emmet Malone.

It's not the first time the Dalymount club has sought to enhance their leading scorer's impressive record. Last season Stephen Kenny persisted in the belief, never shared by members of the media, when Crowe's record in "all competitions" was mentioned it should include the team's pre-season tournament in Spain.

With his status as the league's leading scorer under threat, however, this campaign might be a little more hotly contested for if the goal is credited to Crowe - it is not clear when a decision will be made - then he and Jason Byrne would, theoretically, be going into this evening's meeting between the clubs at Tolka Park tied on 17 league goals apiece.

The figure represents a fine return for their respective clubs but what is remarkable is the extent to which the two championship contenders have become reliant on their goals. Friday's win for Kenny's side over Cork was just the latest in a long line of cases in which it fell to Crowe to save Bohemians while the number crunching reveals without Byrne's goals Shelbourne would lie on 35 rather than 55 points.

What's strange about the situation, though, isn't the fact the pair consistently produce the goods at Premier Division level but that the country's leading clubs appear to be incapable of coming up with a second striker who contributes on such a regular basis.

The problem isn't confined to the top two. Cork, St Patrick's Athletic and Drogheda United rely to a disproportionate extent on the goalscoring abilities of just one player. You have to go back two seasons to find the last time a club (Shamrock Rovers) had two strikers (Tony Grant and Seán Francis) who got into double figures over the league campaign.

Go back a season further and four clubs were in the position (if you count Bray's Colm Tresson who got the majority of his goals from midfield). While Cork showed that year goals aren't everything by finishing third with just three wins less than the winners despite having scored 30 times less, the fact Shelbourne's two top scorers managed fewer than 20 goals between them while the equivalent figure for Bohemians was 36 probably goes a good way towards explaining why the title went to Dalymount.

It could be argued the growing imbalance since then can be put down to the reduced size of the Premier Division with the six-yard box men being sorted from the boys by playing more games against better defences now.

But after last season's fairly dramatic decline from a roughly consistent figure of just over 2.5 goals per game of the previous few seasons to less than 1.75, the average during this campaign has bounced back with the figure to date standing at 2.46 with just 35 of 180 games remaining.

Shelbourne and Bohemians have led the revival with the two sides, despite different approaches, producing attacking football that has resulted in significantly more goals scored than any of the chasing pack.

Despite all of that, however, Crowe and Byrne have contributed more than a third of their respective team's league goals while Henrik Larsson, upon whom Celtic depend heavily, scored only slightly more than a quarter of his club's tally in the SPL last season.

The two clubs' other strikers may contribute a good deal in other ways but it doesn't take much to imagine what either team might achieve if they could uncover a second goal scorer. Shelbourne may even feel they have done so with Jamie Harris doing well since arriving from Richmond Park during the summer.

Galway's Alan Murphy, long a target for Premier Division outfits, is among a number of players who can expect to be love-bombed by the slightly desperate money men from Dublin between now and the start of next season.