12 goals and 18 assists in 72 PL matches is woeful for a striker. You can't say he improved our general play, we would play it nice along the ground for the first 15 mins of games and if that wasn't working we were just pinging it to the gangly bastard up front. We massively improved when Adebayor replaced Crouch, and he wasn't even that good for us, but I remember looking at Ade like he was prime Drogba when he came in and relieved us from the misery of watching that lanky bastard fail to successfully challenge for a single header without turning over possession or giving up a foul. I think there's a lot of revisionist history with Crouch because he's a nice bloke and he has an affinity for Spurs, and he scored *that* goal against City that got us into the CL, but he was absolute dogshit. I think in the last 20 years or so we have only had 2 or 3 strikers worse than him for us, probably Bent, Soldado(if you even bother to include him) and Rebrov. I thought we always looked miles better with Pavlyuchenko on the pitch when Crouch was out the team because the team had to play through midfield with no human skyscraper to aim for with a long ball. Not to mention Pav was a far better natural finisher, just didn't quite have the reading of the game to pull off the languid style of play he had, he was like a budget Berbatov tbh.
