Top Stories

Haji Wright bags fifth league goal of season for Coventry City

14 Shares

Haji Wright is closing out the month of November in similar fashion to the way he started it.

Wright scored the winning goal for Coventry City on Tuesday in a 1-0 triumph over Plymouth Argyle. The U.S. men’s national team forward now has five EFL Championship goals this season, with three of those coming in the month of November.

“It was a perfectly good goal,” Coventry boss Mark Robins said postmatch about Wright. “Haji had a sighter just before and put it over the bar and then the second one is finished it brilliantly. He’s got a chance to score and Milan has found him brilliantly.”

With both teams pressing for a winning goal in the second half, Wright came up clutch for the Sky Blues with 15 minutes to play. Milan van Ewijk’s cross into the box was finished off by Wright into the center of the net, giving the hosts a 1-0 advantage.

Despite Plymouth’s best efforts, the Sky Blues hung on for their second-straight victory fifth overall through 18 league matches played.

Wright led all players in duels won (10), fouls drawn (3), and tackles completed (2) through his 90 minutes on the field. The 25-year-old is second on Coventry’s roster in goals scored, one behind leading-scorer Matt Golden (6).

https://x.com/SkyBluesExtra/status/1729622128712876032?s=20

“Happy for the three points, happy to contribute for my team and we are going to keep building from here,” Wright said postmatch. “Us going forward, we were not as clinical as we would have wanted to be but, in the end, we got the goal and the three points.

“I think it was the small margins and those went our way,” he added. “We battled throughout the whole 90 minutes, and we did not really give them much offensively.”

Coventry’s seven-match December schedule opens on Dec. 2 with a trip to fellow promoted side Ipswich Town.

Comments

  1. the 9 position is a mess for the US. the position — a key one — isn’t integrated into the system. the coach is only calling 2 guys — when 3 is what makes sense — and it’s the same ones over and over. without sorting the system issues out — the “how are we trying to find the 9” question — the personnel decisions become a mess. we also seem to have grown fixated on club form when the best 9 in recent US memory is dempsey who was never the dominate club scorer. nor was mcbride before him.

    we should be figuring out how the 9 will be integrated, which then tells you which player types to emphasize. depending how we plan on serving the striker wright, pefok, vazquez, and ferreira should all be viable alongside pepi and balogun. if we had a brain the offense would be designed around how those two want to be served. as it stands they are both surprisingly productive over time on their game logs for players who are completely lost in the system. which suggests we have plenty of untapped latent upside if we ever sorted the system.

    haji wright is suffering from “scoring in a US knockout” syndrome like green is. most teams having goals in world cup knockouts would earn you a permanent spot on at least the bench. but we have regressed to like 1990s level thought processes with the focus on league goals independent of whether we play that style and you are integrated in the system offense.

    Reply
    • I think we agree that it doesn’t make any sense if you are going to play two strikers that you only bring two into camp. I also think we agree that the team hasn’t figured out how to play with Balo. Service to him is way too slow.
      —————
      I don’t however give much credence to your “he scored in the WC” put him above everyone theory. You can use that if you want to compare him to Sargent or Ferreira but it’s meaningless comparing him to Balo or Pepi who weren’t included in the WC. You can’t discount someone because they weren’t there. Maybe instead of looking at one moment in their career it’s better to look at 1000s of moments including ones that happened in the last three to six months instead of ones that occurred 5 and even 9 years ago to determine who the best player for the next match is?

      Reply
      • JR: i am not saying start him ahead of these 2. you said we should call 3, in different words. so who is no. 3? at that point if i call first choice pepi and balogun are already “in” so who is 3rd. how he compares to them is irrelevant other than as i suggest you might want a tactical type mix, ie, not the same style as the starters. whether you have scored in a world cup does matter compared to the secondary pool competing for slot 3.

        and that assumes first choice and i’ve beaten the drum until i am exhausted that the call sheets shouldn’t be xeroxed for health and also talent eval purposes. players need rest and you also need to invest some time in 3rd-5th choice players to meaningfully sort out who produces in big games. otherwise you get the wondo problem where you try and extrapolate from scattered time against lousy teams only to find they freeze up against a good opponent — which you never tested because you took the friendly schedule too seriously.

    • “we also seem to have grown fixated on club form when the best 9 in recent US memory is dempsey who was never the dominate club scorer.”

      Your nose is extending again.

      Throw out his first half season with Fulham and Clint averaged about 12 goals per season, every season that he was in England.

      Considering Fulham was not a dominant team like Man U or Chelsea at the time, that’s quite impressive.

      You know who was a dominant 9 for the USMNT especially against CONCACRAP teams but not so impressive at his club?

      Jozy

      By the way neither Jozy nor Clint would describe themselves as a fulltime #9.

      Reply
  2. We need more pure strikers on our national team call-up lists. Aside from Pepi and Balogun, recent lists have been lacking in options to score a goal later in a game. Wright and Pefok in my opinion should typically be looked at as they provide something specific in terms of physical impact off the bench. Pefok especially imo for that late game moment when we need to muscle in a goal of a set piece etc.

    Reply
    • i like balogun and pepi if we want to play behind defenses. i like wright and pefok if we want to have a holding forward. i like vazquez if we’re gonna keep whacking crosses in. i like ferreira if we want to go positionless. so what are we trying to do?

      i think we should have at least two different style-types where the sub can accompany a tactical shift. we have a tendency of late to just call people who score goals without much thought of their tactical context. this from a coach who throws around the word “profiles” a lot.

      which types to choose is a mess because i think we have far better ways to play soccer that fit different strikers but you have to implement those tactics to cash out the type value. balogun and pepi we should be sitting back, countering, and playing them behind defenses. not this trash we do. vazquez is the best fit for the current fetish for lazy constant lofted crossing. which IMO is the lowest probability chances we could try. but are we trying to get the 9 involved? isn’t that the point to a 433 or even 4231?

      Reply
  3. Haji’s on pace for a dozen or so goals this season…probably more, since he wasn’t a regular starter until the end of October. Definitely not a bad return for a first season with a new club if he can continue or even improve upon that pace. He trails only Matthew Godden for goals now at Coventry, and Godden has 15 starts and 6 goals to Haji’s 10 and 5.

    Given that the Turkish league is at a generally similar level to the Championship, it was a fair assumption that Wright would likely be successful in England at this tier…but it’s still nice to see him actually doing it and succeeding. And again, not to harp continuously on the notion, but bigger strikers tend to peak later than smaller speedy ones and play well into their 30’s since their game is based on positioning, timing, movement, understanding, and savvy, and those are attributes that tend to get better and not worse with age. Haji at 25 is still probably not the striker he will likely be at age 30 or even 35.

    It’s easy to just assume “hey, it’s Balogun and Pepi with Sargent pushing them”, but Haji’s still positioned to potentially have a say in that argument if he continues to improve.

    Reply
    • I don’t think many people would put the Turkish League on the same level as the English Championship, specifically because the EFC has more depth. I get the allure of the Turkish League bc of UCL, but beyond their top 3 teams it’s a pretty watered down league imo

      Reply
      • We can argue about perception, but where the rubber usually meets the road is plain old-fashioned money. The payrolls of the two leagues are actually very similar per Capology. The top three in the Championship are Leceister (£60.1 million), Southampton (£40.8 million), and Leeds (£39.5 million.) Against that the Super Lig’s top three are Galatasaray (€56.6 million), Fenerbahce (€50.9 million), and Besiktas (€43.0 million.) The conversion rate is 1.16 Euros to the English Pound, so that puts Leceister on top, with the Turkish top three following in #’s 2,3, and 4.

        The rest of the field is actually ever-so-slightly in the Turkish League’s favor as well. The #4 squads on both sides are Trabzonspor in Turkey (€30.1 million) versus Norwich (£24.8 million), so edge to Turkey…and that edge continues all the way down to the bottom where the smallest-money team in the Championship is Plymouth (£6.0 million) versus Kasimpasa (€6.2 million) in the Super Lig.

        Another thing you usually see is, the top-spending teams in the Championship are usually freshly relegated from the Prem and are carrying huge salaries to open the season but especially after the January transfer window they’ve usually sold a number of those top players to shed costs, like we saw this summer with Aaronson and Adams from Leeds. So actually in terms of raw spending power…the Turkish league is a bit ahead.

        Intriguingly, the payrolls between those two leagues and MLS are pretty similar as well, though MLS has no $30+ million teams at the moment. Still, MLS’s smallest-spending team is actually Orlando ($8.5 million), which is well ahead of either Plymouth or Kasimpasa, so there’s a ton more financial parity in MLS than there is in either league too.

        FWIW.

      • Ronniet

        “put the Turkish League on the same level as the English Championship,”

        They are close enough to each other. And Turkey is ancient history now. How Hadji does at Coventry is what matters, not Turkey. I know Americans are a little embarrassed by his accidental “goal” in the World Cup but he did nothing wrong and he did not look out of place. They all count.

        Turkey vs Championship is just one factor. I would think they had him well scouted, which would be a vital thing to me. Most of us on SBI when doing these player evals do not have that luxury. Nor do we have the luxury of speaking with his coaches in Turkey or wherever else he has played.

        My guess is that Coventry took Hadji’s entire CV into account and decided he was worth the 9 million gamble. And at the moment, it looks like they might be wright.

    • to me this is a big example of the fanboy fetish. setting aside the injury issue, and theories that club ball predicts country goals — sargent’s last US goal was march 2021. he was the game 1 starter world cup and nothing happened. we struggled for goals all tournament and his colleague wright managed to score instead of him. he hasn’t done anything in a regional or worlds event to be anywhere near the lineup, plus who knows what he will be post injury.

      more to the point if the plan is hit hopeful crosses in he’s a gawky kid and not exactly a target man or full of foot speed to chase wayward passes.

      Reply
      • If you look at the money – again, see my post above for the Championship/MLS/Turkey discussion – there’s actually at least five and maybe as many as 7-8 US strikers in a bunch after Pepi and Balogun. If you buy into the notion those leagues are of a level (and I do, and MLS and the Championship are actually well ahead of the Dutch league in spending aside from Ajax and PSV and it’s not even close) – then Sargent and Wright are actually performing on a similar level to Duncan McGuire (13 goals), and Jesus Ferreira (12 goals), and those two are actually well ahead of Brandon Vasquez (just 8 goals in ’22-’23 after getting 18 last season). Jeremy Ebobisse and Nicholas Gioacchini also finished ahead of Vasquez this year with 10 goals apiece. You can probably toss Daryl Dike into that category as well since he’s always scored prolifically for his clubs when healthy, though that’s never translated to the USMNT.

        Of course, the top American scorer in MLS? None of those guys. It’s Brian White (15 goals) who plays for Vancouver, and who has never even sniffed the USMNT roster. And of course, if you’re just looking for a giant target man, there’s always Jordan Pefok too.

        I do think Balogun and Pepi stand out from that group, but which one’s our third-best? You got me. You can probably make a case for any of them.

Leave a Comment