During his time at Italian champions Juventus, Fernando Llorente has struggled to replicate the form he showed in La Liga with Atletico Bilbao.His time in Spain was when Llorente showed his real class, resulting in a call up to the national team.
However, life in Italy has proved difficult for the Spaniard, not least due to the competition he has faced at Juventus to play regular football.
You could argue that Llorente has all the attributes that would have made him a top striker forty or fifty years ago; he’s strong, he holds the ball up well, and has a tremendous knack of scoring headers, something which Athletic Bilbao fans will be fully aware of.
Unfortunately for Llorente, strikers have changed since those days. Forwards need to have trickery, they need to run from deep, they need to have pace.
This is probably the reason why the striker has struggled in Italy. The dogged determination of Carlos Tevez, and the rising prominence of other fast, pacy strikers means Llorente has found it difficult to impose his style on the Juventus team.
Nevertheless, we are not talking about a bad player here.
With the transfer window open, there is the possibility of a move away, yet any team that decide to seek Llorente will have to realise the type of player they are getting.
They would have to be patient, and more to the point play to Llorente’s strengths. If you can get the right players around Llorente, you have a good striker in the team. He is not the player he once was but could be worth a punt for any team looking to bolster their attacking options, and would surely not cost a huge amount of money, to those clubs that are interested.
