No.7: Robbie Keane

We wanted a new no.9 this summer and we got one. But he’s wearing… no.7. Okay, it would have been a bit much for Joel Piroe to take Pat Bamford’s shirt off his back, but traditionally the ‘other’ striker at Leeds — from Allan Clarke to Rod Wallace — has worn no.8. Seven is Gordon Strachan! What does Piroe think he’s doing!?

Perhaps he asked what our record goalscorer wore, and fancies himself as the new Peter Lorimer. The thing about Lorimer, though, is that he was out there on the wing like Strachan most of the time (and imagine how many he might have scored if he had played through the middle, Jesus). Strikers wearing no.7 are a rare thing at Leeds, so we thought we’d get Moxco to write about five of them.

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There’s an obvious starting point for figuring out why Robbie Keane, an out-and-out striker, wore no.7 for Leeds. That’s googling ‘Robbie Keane’ and ‘boyhood’.

It stood to reason that the player with more boyhood clubs than a precocious golfer would have chosen his favourite shirt number at a young age, and so it proved, although it wasn’t quite the answer I was looking for.

“I played for the local team when they used to throw the bag onto the floor and all the players, you know, were fighting to get the good numbers, and I’d always be the first one in to grab number 10,” he once said. “When I was a kid growing up, Italian football was always on on a Sunday at two o’clock. For some reason Roberto Baggio always stood out, he always played in the hole and always scored great goals.”

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