Are AFCB's central midfielders sharp shooters?

Having spoken about shots on target this morning I thought I might take a close look at that aspect of AFCB's season so far. While the strikers are doing reasonably well, and Pugh and Fraser have been getting goals from the wings, there is a bit of a dip when you look at the goals from the Cherries' central midfielders. If you add up Arter and O'Kane's goals (O'Kane's was in the League Cup), that is just two goals from central midfield.

It is easy to say the players must be doing more to score from centre midfield, but it is more than likely a sign that the team is not able to push forward in this area as much as it has in the past. After all AFCB are playing better teams now and if too many players from the centre look to get on the end of a move they are likely to get caught out. At home games though I would say that our midfielders should be trying to have more strikes on goal. 

While Ryan Fraser plays on the wing, he is a good player to look at when talking about shooting because he has grown in confidence. In the first few games he was not hitting that many shots and most were not that powerful. But he has worked on this and we have already seen him score a couple of great goals in front of the home fans. The strike against Millwall was not more than a half chance but he buried it with great accuracy. He was just outside the box when he had the shot and this is the area where I think we want to see Harry Arter, Eunan O'Kane, Andrew Surman or Shuan MacDonald looking to have a shot more often. 

But while I remember Arter scoring against Millwall, just inside the 18 yard box, few of the centre midfielders have been rifling in shots on goal from this area so far. Even if the shots do not go in I believe it is worth testing the keeper some times and the ball might always break to a nearby striker or win the team a corner and another goal scoring opportunity.

We know that AFCB's shots on target have not been overly high in recent games, but getting the central midfielders into good shooting positions is one way of improving this area of the team's game.

On Saturday of course AFCB face high scoring Derby County and Cherry Chimes has been speaking Ollie Wright ahead of the game. Ollie is the Derby County Blog author. The Rival Lines tab takes you to his comments and has a video of Derby's recent goal against Yeovil.