John Greechan's Rangers vs Hibs Tactics Zone and how game of patience could play out at Ibrox
World Cup hopeful reveals analysis sessions aimed at sharpening penalty box instincts
As the old gag goes, he’ll be a big lad when he grows up, that Kieron Bowie. Not quite as monstrous as his own personal footballing idol, perhaps. But he’d settle for emulating just a few of the goal-scoring feats that have made Erling Haaland such a fearsome threat to even the world’s best defenders.
Still relatively inexperienced in his first full season as an out-and-out centre forward, Bowie – who started out as a midfielder in youth football and was often deployed as a winger in his early days as a schoolboy in the senior game – is improving before our very eyes. The second goal he scored against Falkirk in last weekend’s win, a real striker’s finish from maybe six yards out, is a case in point.
A target man who can score stunners, as his first goal against the Bairns demonstrated, the 23-year-old is working hard to be more like the Man City and Norway superstar he sees as the “perfect striker”, saying: “Yeah, definitely; he scores an unbelievable amount of goals, and he's always in that area, in the six yard box. And I think he's probably a bit bigger than me. I wish I was as big as him!
“Especially towards the start of the season, I was doing a lot of the work towards the ball, trying to get the ball to feet and finding other players. Whereas Martin Boyle, Thibault Klidje and the other strikers, they all run more in behind, so automatically they're closer to the box than I am.
“It's just that thing of learning switch on quick, get in the box. It wasn't really that natural to me before this season, just to make sure I'm in that box, but it's just coming now, hopefully.
Erling Haaland feasts on chances in six-yard box
“I speak to a lot of people, and obviously they speak about Haaland, who is doing it at the highest level - but just how many goals he scores just in the width of the six-yard box. Every week he just scores a goal, it's just a tap-in, but it's a goal at the end of the day.
“I look at the highlights of the games and you'll just see how many runs he makes. He makes 10 different runs before he gets a goal. It's a lot to watch, but yes, he's very good at it.
Read More
“That's the thing, you make 10 runs and you only get the ball once, but you need to make sure that one time you get the goal. It's tough as a striker, you might have missed a few chances and then you don't get another chance at a game and you're raging at yourself for missing, and that's all you think about for the next few days.
“I guess the point of the gaffer is, he might show us in a meeting and say: ‘Look at him, he's raging because he's only getting the ball.’ Sometimes we might be throwing our arms up in anger, do you know what I mean?
“Me and Boyle, wondering why someone’s not passing us the ball, but there's obviously a lot of method to it. I feel like we get a fair amount of chances in games.”
Bowie says analysis sessions on his own performances have helped sharpen up his skills in the traditional No. 9 role. Not a position he’s overly familiar with … at least not since his days a budding striker with Glenrothes Strollers.
Centre forward played senior football for Raith aged 16
The Scotland forward, who made his Raith first-team debut as a 16-year-old, said: “Last season I was injured for the majority of the season, and then I come back and I'm starting to play up front, and I'm just trying to get to grips with a lot of things. Obviously it's different when you come back from an injury, you're like: ‘Am I in the right position on the pitch, what am I doing here?’
“But yeah, definitely, it's a lot of learning as I play games, even now. Constantly just learning and making sure I'm switched on.
“Early on at Raith I would always play on the wings. It was just positional, like strikers, and I would just play on the wings, just so I could get on the team, because the gaffer at the time, John McGlynn, liked me. And then I went to Fulham, and I played striker there for a year, and then I played 23s. I played on the wing, the majority didn't play much,was I injured a lot.
“I went to Northampton, just because of personnel and all that, and obviously I was an on loan player. They put me on the wing. So I just sort of stayed there, but then obviously I was coming up here, they saw me as a striker.”
Indirect route to No. 9 role for Bowie
Explaining his roundabout route to the No. 9 jersey in the senior game, Bowie confessed: "To be honest, I wasn't really big into watching football when I was younger. Until I started playing a lot at 16, I didn't really watch much of it, so I can't really put my finger on any one striker that I wanted to be like - especially because I didn't start playing striker until I was about 14 or something.
“I played everywhere before that. Centre mid, really, just because I kicked the ball the furthest!
"I went to a different club, Glenrothes Strollers, and they were like:'We've not got a striker, can you just play there?' So that's basically how it happened.
"I started scoring goals, and it just sort of went from there. The coach at Strollers, Paul Browne, played for Aston Villa when he was younger and stuff.”
Bowie has developed into a genuine talent at Easter Road, so much so that he’s at least in with a shot of being part of Scotland’s World Cup squad next summer. If the goals keep coming at a steady clip, of course.
"You want to score every week, and if I come off the pitch and I've not scored but we've won 3-0, I'm still raging that I've not scored,” he admitted. "But that's because, as a striker, you need to be like that. You've just got to get on with it and get in the right positions to score goals.
"I might miss a sitter now and again. But at least I'm in that position, and that's the main thing to take away from it.
"As a striker, you're not going to score every single week. Unless you're Erling Haaland!”
Continue Reading