A sub to Love

Melbourne announced its latest signing, bringing on board Brazilian striker Leandro Rodriguez da Silva, aka  Leandro Love, aka Leandro, from J-League’s Kobe Vissel. It’s a one year loan deal, making him the third loaned player on Melbourne’s roster, along with Kaz Patafta and Carlos Hernandez. It is now becoming apparent that this is a preferred way for the Victory to attract quality players while minimising expenses.

While it is not likely that Leandro will feature prominently for the team, he is a much needed addition to the squad, which has been desperately lacking a third striker. With both Thompson and Allsopp now on the Socceroo’s radar, Melbourne would be in deep trouble if schedules conflicted during the season and, if nothing else, Leandro provides some peace of mind. But to write him off as nothing more than a back-up would be underplaying his role. A quality third striker can prove vitally important in dead-locked matches or matches where the team is down by a goal. Who could forget the role James Robinson played in last season’s semi-final?

While we still know very little about this player, Merrick seems to be underplaying his quality with comments like this: “The third striker really has to know he’s a back-up striker, so that’s why we’ve gone for a 21-year-old who’s . . . pretty fit and ready to go.” Certainly not the glowing words that Merrick has reserved for some of the other signings. That said, Leandro does seem a reasonable prospect at least, apparently having scored 4 goals during his stint at Brazilian state team Rio Branco in the Paulista State Championships. Here’s one of his goals (against Palmeiras) I managed to dig up on YouTube. It’s the second goal:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATUF5ZXruzE[/youtube]