Every Brenden Aaronson goal could be a Lee Bowyer goal
That's the theory, anyway. Let's look at some Brenden Aaronson goals and see how they measure for Bowyerism.
The first time I noticed this was when Brenden Aaronson won the Austrian title with his old club and, as the beer his teammates had thrown over him dripped from his brow into his mouth, a change from Red Bull for his 21-year-old taste buds, and I looked up the goals he'd scored in Salzburg while marking time before his move to a real football club in Leeds. Excitement, adventure, Tetley's!
He'd got two in the last few months, not counting a penalty in the title clincher. One against Rapid Wien and one against Wolfsberger, both, I wrote, 'from late arrivals into the box, shooting in like prime Lee Bowyer'.
Then here he was with the USA last week, playing against Morocco, doing it yet again:
Lee Bowyer made this his trademark at Leeds. 'All action' was the cliche of choice for Bowyer, whose runs were always 'lung bursting', and part of his goalscoring style must have been through necessity: he would be back in his own half, hunting the ball, leaving him behind the play when Leeds rushed forward; but up-field sprints and attacking instincts got him into position just in time for a loose ball dropping around the edge of the area. With plenty of strikers to worry about, from Jimmy Hasselbaink to Mark Viduka to, well, Ian Rush and Mark Hateley weren't really an issue but, anyway, defenders never saw Bowyer coming, and keepers weren't expecting his shots. The comeback winner, from 3-0 to 4-3 against Derby County, is the template Bowyer goal, but there were so many like this:
Here's another to be taken into consideration. Note his starting position on the edge of our box, and his bravery to take this one off Hasselbaink and worry about that argument later:
And there are twelve minutes of this stuff to watch here, in the uploader's words, a tribute to 'a hateful little shit that I can't help but love'.