ONE of the best strikers I listened to when I was a player was Gary Lineker.

I remember watching one of his interviews and he said something along the lines of, ‘I’ll make 100 runs just to get one goal’.

He was so right.

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As a striker you have to make runs and hope one of them leads to a chance and you’re in the right place at the right time to take it.

And I think that’s what Jordan Rhodes has got to work on now.

His strike-partner Rudy Gestede is what I would call an aerial footballer.

His ground play is okay but I would say in general his main threat is in the air.

So, if you’re playing alongside him, you’ve got to anticipate play and be proactive, whereas I would say at the minute Jordan is more reactive, in that he will wait to see where Rudy puts it and then react.

If Jordan proacts, and makes that gambling run beyond Rudy, into spaces, I think he will get more opportunities and, given his finishing ability, more goals too.

I call them gambling runs.

I remember doing them over and over again when I played up front with Chris Sutton for Blackburn.

Sutty would go up and flick headers and one day he turned around to me one day and said, ‘Kevin, how you do know where I’m going to head the ball?’ I said, ‘Sutty, I don’t, I just make a run in an area where I think you are going to head it’.

And that’s what I did, I gambled and I scored some wonderful goals from just making runs.

If Jordan can do that he will add even more to his game and he will be more of a potent threat.

Here’s hoping he returned to scoring ways last night – and here’s hoping he continues that at Nottingham Forest on Saturday.

I said in last week’s column I didn’t have many happy memories of Ipswich Town.

But Forest are different. I scored a hat-trick against Forest not long after my introduction into English football, with Coventry, and that night I was up against Stuart Pearce, who of course is now their manager.

And when I moved to Blackburn we always seemed to get results against them.

Meanwhile, there are still places left at my G8 Soccer School behind Salesbury Memorial Hall between October 27 and 31 for children aged eight to 13.

For more details visit www.g8soccerschool.co.uk