It may not always be pretty, but the Ghanaian forward's goals have been crucial to a side who often struggle to create chances
Jordan Ayew is one of the stories of the season.
In a campaign during which no other Crystal Palace player has more than three goals, Ayew has scored eight times. That doesn't even equate to a ratio of one every three games, but it’s an important statistic which describes one of Palace’s biggest weaknesses, as well as the value of a player who many have been fairly dismissive of in the past.
Ayew scored that eighth goal on Saturday. Reliably, it was a picture: a touch out of his feet, then a snapped, drilled shot into Ben Foster’s far corner. Following his winner at Brighton, it was the second time in two games that he had scored the only goal in a 1-0 victory, and across the season as a whole, the sixth time he had scored in games Palace have won by a single goal.
But the game against Watford was a vivid depiction of his worth. According to the website Understat, Palace mined an Expected Goals rating of just 0.85 from Saturday’s 90 minutes, with the chance from which Ayew scored a very unlikely 0.07.
It was emblematic of his year, really. The win didn’t quite take Palace to assured safety, but with 39 points and nine games remaining, they can begin to plan for next year, and ultimately because they - a side who don’t create a lot of chances and who have been unable to cure Christian Benteke’s terminal lack of self-belief - have a forward in Ayew who blends more industrious qualities with a capacity to score important goals at critical moments.
It’s a contradiction of sorts: he’s a player without a proper, positional definition, yet he’s managed to be precisely what Palace have needed.
That nebulous quality has been a continuous theme. Back at the beginning of July 2019, he scored the first of Ghana’s two goals against Guinea Bissau in the Africa Cup of Nations. He collected a pass just beyond the halfway line, hustled and bustled his way past a defender and into the penalty box, and then lifted his finish into the top corner.
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At the point of scoring, it was a really artistic goal with a beautiful arc at its end. Including the seconds before, though, it was also indicative of Ayew’s many contradictions, with some stumbling skill leading to that moment of pure, technical composure. It showed all of his component parts: the willingness to make the run, the optimism to take on his markers, and then the nerve and ability to finish.
A few months later, he would score that same goal again, but this time for Palace, at home against Aston Villa. Again: a breaking run, then a stumble through the tackles, before a nice, neat finish across the goalkeeper.
Ayew isn’t the most gifted player in the world. In truth, seeing his range of attributes in synthesis is a rare treat and it's not very often during his time in English football that they've harmonised.
Occasionally they have. The more recent winner over West Ham – his second of the season – was one such occasion. It still came with that slightly clumsy quality, like a child tripping through puddles, but it ended with a gorgeously deft chip as that game was drifting towards stoppage time.
He also scored a couple of memorable goals for Swansea, including a rasping drive against Palace back in December 2017, and ripped a curling long-ranger out of the sodden turf at St James' Park during his time at Aston Villa. More traditionally, though, he’s been a bits and pieces attacker. Not even a real centre-forward at all, actually, certainly not in the orthodox sense.
But here he is, already having scored more goals than in any of his other Premier League season, and on the cusp of bettering the career-best twelve he managed for Lorient in 2014-15.
Other players will get the headlines this season – bigger names who’ve made weightier contributions to more significant causes. But this has been a triumph too.
For Roy Hodgson, who will finish the year having likely got more out of an enigmatic player than any other manager. For Palace, who would have been in all sorts of woe without him. And, of course, for Ayew himself, who was often – unfairly, as it turns out – used to characterise the deficiencies at his club or to make a case for their relegation.
He's not quite one of the Players of the Year, but he's somewhere on the long list.
Seb Stafford-Bloor is a football writer at Tifo Football and member of the Football Writers' Association. He was formerly a regularly columnist for the FourFourTwo website, covering all aspects of the game, including tactical analysis, reaction pieces, longer-term trends and critiquing the increasingly shady business of football's financial side and authorities' decision-making.
