Leigh Griffiths scored 40 goals for Celtic during the 2015-16 season.
James Forrest has revealed to The Daily Mail that Brendan Rodgers has long spoken about Celtic’s need to add goals from other areas.
Rodgers joined Celtic in 2016 and inherited a team which had been carried by Leigh Griffiths during the 2015-16 campaign, with the Scot scoring 40 goals in all competitions under Ronny Deila.
But Griffiths only managed 12 during Rodgers’s first season at Parkhead, as Scott Sinclair and Moussa Dembele both broke the 20-goal barrier and with it, the Hoops’ reliance on the 27-year-old marksman.
The Northern Irish manager only has one available striker at the moment – Odsonne Edouard, who struggled in Sunday’s 2-0 defeat by Hibernian – and Forrest has called on his Celtic team-mates to share the goalscoring burden from here on in.
He told The Daily Mail: “The manager spoke as soon as he arrived about the season before he came when Griff had scored 40 goals.
“He made the point it was good for a striker to be doing that, but that others needed to chip in and that it’s never all about one player.”
Griffiths has been ruled out for a number of months for personal reasons and the Celtic manager is already on record as saying that he wants not one, but two centre-forward options in the January transfer window.
That should, in theory, help relieve Edouard of some of the pressure involved in being the Bhoys’ only goalscorer, but the French striker, 20, is still a £9 million player so much of the pressure will invariably fall on his shoulders.
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