Alexander Sorloth is proving himself to be a ‘really good striker’ in La Liga with the one-time Crystal Palace and Premier League misfit hitting a hat-trick for Villarreal against Granada.
The irony will be lost on no one of a red-and-blue persuasion.
Despite the best efforts of Jean-Philippe Mateta, who ploughed a lone furrow again in a typically hard-running display in Saturday’s 3-1 defeat at Tottenham, how new Crystal Palace boss Oliver Glasner could do with a striker of Alexander Sorloth’s qualities.
The former Palace benchwarmer plundered a 59-minute hat-trick as Villarreal ran riot over a doomed Granada. As such, Sorloth now has 12 La Liga goals this season. 14 in all competitions. More than Mateta and Odsonne Edouard combined, and a tally only five other players in Spain’s top flight can boast.
Former Crystal Palace striker can’t stop scoring
“Years ago he was at Palace and he never got a game. Everyone wrote him off and said it was a disaster. He got heavily criticised but he barely played!” Spanish football expert Terry Gibson says on El Tel and Jon’s La Liga Weekly podcast.
“So when he turned up in Spain I thought ‘how is this going to work?’”
Sorloth famously made only four Premier League starts in Crystal Palace colours, his lack of opportunities feeling all the more baffling when you consider that Christan Benteke was hardly banging in the goals at the time.
But Palace, Gibson argues, are not the only club who may wish they had taken a different direction with the well-travelled Sorloth. Since leaving Real Sociedad in the summer – La Real opted not to sign their former loanee permanently prior to his £9 million switch to Villarreal – Imanol Alguacil’s side have found goals increasingly hard to come by.
14 La Liga goals in 2023/24
“Why didn’t Real Sociedad buy him? He was good (for them),” former Manchester United and Tottenham forward Gibson adds, Sociedad’s wastefulness costing them in that 2-0 Champions League first-leg defeat to PSG.
“I think he’s a really good striker. When you see him in the form he was in at the weekend, I think he’s a real asset.
“From that setback he had at Crystal Palace, he’s making a real good career for himself. I think Sorloth is really good, I really do.”
Palace have been linked with a number of strikers recently. Toulouse’s Netherlands international Thijs Dallinga and AZ Alkmaar talisman Vangelis Pavlidis among them.
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