“Growing up as a boy football supporter in the 1960s, I cannot remember coming across the term striker. Can anyone identify when or where this description of a goalscorer was first used?” asks Simon Warner.
It’s a good time for the question, with Erling Haaland and Darwin Núñez joining the Premier League this summer. Let’s start with the relevant part of the definition in the Collins online dictionary
An attacking player, esp one who generally positions himself or herself near the opponent’s goal in the hope of scoring
The position has been around since football began, but it seems – both anecdotally and through trawling the newspaper archives – that it didn’t really become commonplace unt…