Pace and power – striker would be a smart piece of business for Portsmouth

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MK Dons striker Chuks Aneke has been linked with a move to Pompey. We got the lowdown on the hit man from Milton Keynes Citizen sports editor Toby Lock.

 

Chuks Aneke is certainly an enigma - and one who possesses real pace and power.

He’s a massive lump of a player, incredibly strong and built like a house.

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People would look at him and think he’s a target man, but he’s a lot more than that.

He’s probably not best used as a target man, actually. Paul Tisdale’s preferred formation is a 4-3-3 and he often played wide with Kieran Agard through the middle.

There was a time in the season where he’s used as an impact player off the bench, coming on around the hour mark and affecting things from a little deeper.

A lot of the wins for Tisdale’s side came as a result of that over the second half of the season.

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Chuks scored 19 goals this season but he can really affect games with his assists, too. It was his assists which kept Dons going really in the season in which they were relegated from League One.

There’s a misconception you can lump the ball up to him and he can lay it off - but he’s actually not too good at that.

He has a good first touch and can bring the ball down, but he’s much better playing deep and running at people.

The goals against Yeovil and Notts County last season certainly highlight that. That’s what he has in his locker.

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When he first joined he’d been out for the best part of a year in Belgium with a knee injury, which didn’t get treated properly.

He missed most of the first half of that season but came back and quickly became a favourite with fans.

Then he pulled a hamstring badly which kept him out for five or six months and was in and out with niggles when he came back.

It wrecked his first two years really and hindered his stats.

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In terms of his future, I think Tisdale is resigned to losing him really.

He was probably one of the biggest losers financially when they went down, but he has been made a better offer than his current deal.

I think that offer is going to be timed out, however, over the next couple of days.

There’s no reason he couldn’t go to Portsmouth, impress there and improve his value.

That was the plan here last August, but no one really met the Dons’ valuation.

If he does end up at Portsmouth I’d say fair play to him - and it would be a smart business deal.

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