Would this Ukrainian have fitted Roy’s striker criteria?

Liverpool manager Roy Hodgson spoke on Friday about his pursuit of a striker on the final day of the transfer window. He believes that the profile of striker that the club were looking for was not available for the right price:

“I don’t think there was a great choice in terms of centre-forwards out there for any of the teams. We didn’t see much movement in terms of strikers between the Premier League clubs. There’s a lot of clubs chasing a particular type of player. Maybe that player at the moment doesn’t exist. “And the money we needed to sign a player of that quality came to the club very late anyway. It was only after the sale of Mascherano that I would have had the money available to do a transfer at a high enough level. So there are two things. One, the shortage of time would have bothered me and I would have been concerned that we were jumping into something without researching it fully. And two, I didn’t see the players out there that really excited me.”

A striker linked with Liverpool in recent days is Dynamo Kiev’s Artem Milevskiy. Would this 25 year old Ukrainian fit the bill for Roy? The Reds boss is most likely looking to bring in a striker in January who can play in a lone centre forward role and Milevskiy certainly has the physical and technical attributes to play the position. At 6ft 3, he is relatively tall but he is surprisingly nimble with his feet despite his height. Described as a powerful forward who can be a handful for defenders, Milevskiy is also equally comfortable shooting with either foot.

A product of the Smena Football School in Minsk, Belarus, Milevskiy joined Dynamo Kiev in the year 2000 at the age of 15. He spent the 2001/02 season on loan at Borysfen-2 Boryspil scoring 3 goals in 8 matches before returning to play in Kiev’s second team. Although he moved into Kiev’s first team for the 2003/04 campaign, he only began to become a first team regular at the end of the 2005/06 season. At the start of the following campaign, he was named the Ukrainian league’s player of the month for August in 2006 and he established himself as an important member of the squad. For the next two seasons he didn’t score very regularly playing in his favoured second striker role but in his last two campaigns, he has scored 18 and 19 goals respectively in all competitions.

His efforts for Kiev have not gone unnoticed at international level. Belarusian born, Milevskiy was part of Belarus’s U16 team, but after his move to Kiev, he opted to change his nationality to the Ukraine. After playing for the Ukraine U19 side that made it to the semi-finals of the European Championships in 2004, Milevskiy was named in the team of the tournament after Ukraine finished runners up to the Netherlands in the 2006 European U21 Championships. It wasn’t long before he was called up by the senior team and he was named in Ukraine’s squad for the 2006 World Cup. He made his debut coming on as a late substitute in a group match against Saudi Arabia before taking one of the successful penalties in the shoot out victory versus Switzerland in the last 16 using his famous “Panenka” technique (video below). Milevskiy actually made his full debut for the Ukraine in the quarter final of the World Cup but the team lost 3-0 to eventual tournament winners Italy.

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