Schuurs, Arokodare and the Silence in the Air: Portrait of a Target Man

In the mixed zone of the Johan Cruijff ArenA, Perr Schuurs stood still for a few seconds before speaking. Sweat was still drying on his collar. A defender, by convention, would begin with himself — with the ball he misread, with the step he took half a beat too late. But Schuurs chose instead to speak about the man who had made his night longer than expected. He spoke about Tolu Arokodare. In his voice there was something that was both admiration and a carefully concealed helplessness. I sat in a corner of the stand, notebook open, and recorded that moment — the moment a player admits he has just come up against something larger than he had prepared for. Before becoming a name, everyone is only a running figure. And sometimes that running figure is a giant back waiting for a high ball, quiet and patient, like a lighthouse no one notices until the ship nearly strikes it. The match between Ajax and NEC, an ordinary Eredivisie night in Amsterdam, became the place where a defender spoke about a striker as though speaking about a natural phenomenon. Perr Schuurs, born in 2026, came through the Fortuna Sittard academy and then Ajax, the archetype of a centre-back trained to read the game with his head before his feet. He left Amsterdam to join Torino in Serie A, carrying the baggage of a man who believes in position and timing more than in raw strength. For that reason, when Schuurs admits he struggled against a striker, that admission carries weight. It is not a polite post-match compliment. Tolu Arokodare is a name rarely mentioned in the major bulletins. Born in Nigeria, raised on a journey of movement across Europe, he carries the essence of the classic target man: tall, strong, knowing how to use his back to shield the ball, knowing when to spring. In the Eredivisie — a league that favours technique and tempo — a player of Arokodare's mould is sometimes seen as a relic of a different era of football. But Schuurs, who faced him directly, saw something else. The source of these quotes is De Telegraaf, the long-established Dutch sports newspaper, aggregated by Goal.com. I am always cautious with such aggregated pieces: they tend to keep the good quote but cut away the context. Here, however, the context is precisely what matters. The first thing Schuurs emphasised was a difference of type. He compared Arokodare to Romelu Lukaku — a striker who reshaped how people think about the number 9 in Europe — but to say that they are not alike. Lukaku, at his peak, is a multi-purpose machine: he can receive the ball to feet, turn, stretch the play, act as a wall. Arokodare is different. He wants the ball to arrive on his chest or in the air, not at his feet. It is a small statement, but it defines an entire player profile. When a defender says that his opponent prefers to receive the ball on his chest rather than at his feet, he is saying something profound about how the match will unfold. A ball arriving on the chest means a ball arriving from above, from long passes, from crosses. It means the game will be stretched vertically, that the midfield will have to run more, that the defenders will face a physical problem before they face a technical one. A target man is not a crude player; he is an architect of aerial space. Height is only a necessary condition. What decides it is timing — the moment a player springs before the defender reads his intention. Schuurs, a man who lives by reading intentions, admitted that Arokodare's timing troubled him. He listed a string of qualities: strength, intelligence, height, jumping ability, and timing. What stands out is that intelligence is placed on a par with strength. In the common talk about tall strikers, only the physical is usually mentioned. But Schuurs, a man who believes in positional intelligence, stressed that Arokodare is not merely a block of muscle that knows how to jump. He knows when to spring, and that is an intellectual skill, not a physical trait. Try to picture a specific moment. The ball is played long from the opposition defence. Arokodare stands between two centre-backs, his back to goal. The defender marking him feels his breath on his neck. The ball is travelling. In that instant there are three choices: spring early, spring late, or stand still. The one who springs early will be read by the defender and intercepted. The one who springs late will lose the ball to his opponent. The one who stands still will let the ball drop and lose the initiative. Arokodare, according to Schuurs, chooses the right moment — the moment when the defender has committed to a direction and cannot change his mind. That is why I always tell young editors: never judge a target man by the stats sheet alone. The stats sheet will tell you how many aerial duels he won, but it will not tell you how he won them. An aerial duel won by timing is entirely different from one won by strength, even though both are recorded identically in the data column. The difference lies here: the one who wins by strength will keep winning until he meets someone stronger; the one who wins by timing will keep winning until he meets someone who reads the game faster. And those who read the game faster are far rarer. There is one detail in Schuurs's account that I consider the most important, and yet the easiest to overlook. He said Arokodare "likes" to receive the ball on his chest or in the air. That word "likes" carries an implication of choice. It suggests that Arokodare could receive the ball to feet if he wanted to — but chooses not to. This is a subtle distinction between a player limited in technique and a player who limits himself to his strengths. If it is the first case, it is an exploitable weakness. If it is the second, it is a strategy that can be countered, but not easily. I have spent many years watching target men across different leagues, from small stadiums in England to great stands in continental Europe, and I have learned that this player type lives or dies by the quality of the service provided to him. A target man does not create chances by himself. He turns ordinary balls into chances. But if those balls do not arrive — if the midfield chooses to pass short instead of long, if the full-backs do not cross, if the team plays possession football — then he becomes a lonely island in the middle of the pitch, waving his arms at no one. This is why I am always suspicious of player assessments based on individual data detached from tactical context. A target man can have excellent aerial stats at a team that plays directly, and terrible stats at a team that plays tiki-taka. The same person, the same two feet, but two entirely different stories. In football there is no absolutely good or bad player; there is only a player who fits or does not fit a system. Back to Arokodare. If Schuurs is right — that he is a rare target man with a combination of height, timing and strength — then the next question is: is Ajax the right environment for him? In theory, a club like Ajax, with its tradition of controlling the ball and technique, might not be the ideal place for a striker who lives on high balls. But modern football has changed. Even possession-loving teams need a direct option when opponents sit deep. A good target man is a strategic weapon, a way to break a stalemate without changing the entire philosophy. In the Eredivisie, where centre-backs are typically trained to play the ball with their feet and read the game, a target man can be a physical shock. Dutch defenders are good at intercepting, good at passing, good at holding position. But they are not always trained to face a man ten kilos heavier, ten centimetres taller, who knows how to use his body as a tool. That is the tactical gap a target man exploits: not a gap in the formation, but a gap in the defensive culture. Schuurs, as a centre-back trained in the Dutch school, is the embodiment of that culture. He reads the game, he holds position, he believes in intelligence. And when he met an opponent who beat him with something that intelligence cannot fully compensate for — physique combined with timing — he had to exclaim. That is why his praise has value. It does not come from a fan, but from an expert who has just been challenged. But I must be careful here. We are talking about a single match, a single perspective, a single evening. In my profession I have learned that post-match assessments are often inflated by the emotion of the moment. A defender who has just endured a difficult night will tend to exaggerate the qualities of the man who troubled him — because admitting that an opponent is very good is a way of protecting one's own ego. If I lose to an ordinary man, I am weak. If I lose to an exceptional man, I am merely unlucky. This is a psychological bias every analyst must recognise: praise after defeat often serves the speaker more than the one praised. So how should we read Schuurs's words? I propose a two-layer reading. The first layer is the layer of fact: Arokodare genuinely has the qualities Schuurs describes. Height, strength, jumping ability and timing are observable, and a professional defender does not invent them. The second layer is the layer of exaggeration: the degree to which Schuurs inflates those qualities to console himself. The two layers do not exclude each other. They coexist, and the reader's task is to distinguish them. What I find most remarkable is Schuurs's choice to compare Arokodare to Lukaku. Lukaku is one of the most successful strikers of his generation, a man who has played for the biggest clubs in Europe and scored hundreds of goals. Placing Arokodare beside Lukaku is a bold statement. But Schuurs does not say they are alike; he says they are different. And within that difference, he implies that Arokodare belongs to the same category — the category of elite target men — but with a style of his own. A comparison is not an equation; sometimes a comparison is a way of saying that a name deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence. There is another layer of meaning I want to excavate. In modern football, the target man is becoming rarer. Academies prioritise technique, speed and the ability to play in tight spaces. A player like Arokodare — who prefers high balls to balls to feet — is sometimes considered outdated, a product of the past. But football is an ecosystem, and in that ecosystem every player type has a place if there is a system that knows how to use them. The scarcity of a player type does not make it outdated; it makes it more valuable to the teams that know they need it. This is where I want to push back against the popular view. Many analysts argue that modern football has moved beyond the target man, that he is a relic of the long-ball era. I disagree. Football does not evolve in a straight line; it evolves in cycles. When every team plays short, when every centre-back is trained to play with his feet, then the gap appears precisely where no one trains to defend any more: in the air. A good target man in this era is not a step backwards; he is a differential advantage. In a league where everyone plays the same way, the one who plays differently wins. I remember an evening at a small stadium in England, where I watched a 34-year-old target man who had spent his whole career in the lower leagues. He was not fast, not skilful, not famous. But he knew exactly when to spring. Throughout the match he won almost every important aerial duel, not because he was the tallest — but because he understood the rhythm of the game better than anyone on the pitch. After the match I asked him his secret. He said: "I don't jump the highest. I just jump at the right time." That sentence has stayed with me for years. It reminds me that in sport, as in life, timing is often more important than strength. Arokodare, according to Schuurs's account, appears to be a player who understands this. He does not rely on height alone; he relies on his ability to read timing. And in football, a player who can read timing is a player who is hard to neutralise. You can mark him tighter, you can play zonal defence, you can bring in another centre-back to face him. But if he reads the moment before you do, then all your tactical preparation becomes meaningless. This leads me to a counter-intuitive angle. We usually think that to defend against a target man, the most important thing is to have a tall, strong centre-back. But Schuurs's account suggests the opposite. What troubled Schuurs was not Arokodare's strength — Schuurs is a professional centre-back, he has faced many strong players. What troubled him was the combination of strength and timing. And to counter that combination, what you need is not a stronger defender, but a better-organised back line. You cannot win a physical battle by bringing in a better physical warrior; you can only win it by changing the rules of the battle. In Ajax's case, that means cutting off the supply of balls to Arokodare, rather than trying to neutralise him directly. Cutting the long pass, pressing the passer, forcing the opponent to play short — that is how you neutralise a target man without confronting him directly. But that requires tactical discipline and coordination between the lines, which not every team has. And this is where I return to my core view on transfer data. Modern data models evaluate players based on measurable indices: goals, assists, aerial duels won, touches. But they often undervalue the unmeasurable: dressing-room chemistry, fit with the system, and the ability to read timing. A target man like Arokodare can have modest stats at a team that does not know how to use him, and excellent stats at a team that does. The data model will not see that. Data tells you what a player has done; it does not tell you what a player could do in a different environment. I have seen this many times in my career. A player undervalued at one club, then shining at another, not because he changed, but because the environment changed. Football is a sport of systems, not of isolated individuals. A good player in the wrong system is a bad player. An ordinary player in the right system is a good player. This is a truth that data models, with all their sophistication, have not yet fully grasped. So what should we take from the story of Schuurs and Arokodare? First, we should be cautious about assessments based on a single match. One difficult night does not make a career, and one compliment does not define a player. Second, we should pay attention to player types that are becoming rarer, because scarcity is often a sign of value. Third, we should remember that football is a sport of context, and no player exists in a vacuum. There is one more thing I want to say. An empty chair still seats a person — we simply no longer hear their applause. In this story, the person sitting in that empty chair is all the target men who go unmentioned, who play with their backs and with their timing, who never appear in the bulletins yet quietly shape how the match unfolds. Arokodare, on one night in Amsterdam, stepped out of that darkness, only for a few moments, enough for a defender to exclaim. But how many others remain in the darkness, waiting for a high ball that never comes? On the track, records are measured in hundredths of a second; outside it, life is measured in breaths. In football, an aerial duel is measured in centimetres and milliseconds. But behind those numbers lies an entire human life: sessions in the rain, journeys of migration across countries, lonely nights in rented rooms, the times of being undervalued and overlooked. Arokodare, born in Nigeria and raised on a journey of movement across Europe, carries all of that within him. When he springs to meet a high ball, he is not only contesting with a defender; he is contesting with everything that has tried to hold him back. And Schuurs, that defender, when he admits he struggled, is admitting something larger than a personal defeat. He is admitting that there are things in football that go beyond preparation, beyond tactics, beyond data. He is admitting that sometimes you meet a man at the right time, in the right place, and there is nothing you can do to stop him. It is a humble admission, and in a football world full of confident declarations, that humility is something precious. I do not know what Arokodare's future will hold. Perhaps he will become a big name, transferred for tens of millions of euros, courted by the giants. Perhaps he will fade into oblivion, a name mentioned once in an aggregated article and then gone. A transfer is how we name a parting so that it sounds less like a parting. And in that transfer world, a player like Arokodare will be judged by numbers: market value, resale potential, return on investment. But those numbers will not capture what Schuurs felt on one night at the Johan Cruijff ArenA. What I want to keep from this story is not the numbers, but a moment. The moment a defender, who believes in intelligence and position, stands in the mixed zone and admits he has just met something beyond his understanding. That is the moment when football, with all its harshness and calculation, becomes human. That is the moment when an unknown striker, for a few brief seconds, becomes a name. Perhaps the right question is not whether Arokodare is truly as good as Schuurs says. The right question is: what made a professional defender, who has faced hundreds of strikers in his career, stop and speak about one man? The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that football still holds surprises. Despite all the data, all the video analysis, all the predictive models, players still emerge from nowhere and overturn every calculation. And that is what makes this sport worth watching. I will close here, with an image. Late at night in Amsterdam, the stadium lights are off, only the empty rows of seats silent under the moon. In some corner, perhaps the applause of those no longer there still rings out — applause for a target man who sprang at the right time, who won an aerial duel, who made a defender remember his name. A good match is never fully told; it only waits for someone silent enough to hear. And sometimes, the one silent enough to hear is the one who was just defeated.