Classic No 9s are becoming a dying breed

David Villa of Spain is the perfect example of how today's coaches want more than just goals from centre-forward.

David Villa shows his disappointment after missing a chance against Lithuania on Friday night that would have seen him overtake Raul’s record of 44 international goals for Spain.

"Anxiety," Vicente Del Bosque, Spain's head coach, called it.

Most others in the stadium in Salamanca last Friday diagnosed it the burden of history weighing on the shoulders of David Villa.

They glimpsed Villa scowl and witnessed one of those misses that will linger long in the memory, a fluffed effort at goal that seemed harder to aim off target than to direct into the net.

It was an uncharacteristic finish for Villa, who cut a frustrated figure during Spain's 3-1 win over Lithuania, his 68th cap for his country. Villa's anxiety, it is widely suspected, stemmed from his eagerness to cross an important threshold. He has scored 44 goals for Spain. One more - he may get it tonight against Scotland in their Group I Euro 2012 qualifier at Hampden Park - will take him past Raul, the former Real Madrid player, as his nation's leading all-time scorer.

Raul took 102 matches to reach his 44 goals so Villa's potency, his goals-per-game ratio, is far superior. But Raul's shadow over Spanish football is long. Villa wants to escape it, to stand alone at the summit. In many minds, Villa is already out on his own, the best all-round European striker currently at work. It is hard to call him a centre-forward in the traditional sense, because he so often attacks from wide positions, and does so much work outside the penalty area.

Then again, most strikers are now expected to do a good deal more than poke home, or head in, chances from close range, which in part may explain why Villa has so few peers in the field of Europe's finest marksmen. Look around the weekend's Euro 2012 qualifiers. Italy, whose greatest all-time international scorer is still Gigi Riva, a figure from 30 years ago, could not find a way through Northern Ireland's defence, despite fielding, at various points in the 90 minutes two different target men, Marco Borriello and Giampaolo Pazzini, a trickster, Antonio Cassano, and the zippy, in-form Giuseppe Rossi.

These are not vintage times for great Italian strikers. In Serie A, the forwards on whom the most ambitious clubs rely tend to be from abroad: the likes of Samuel Eto'o, Gabriel Milito or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It is not just Italy. Europe currently seems to produce a lower concentration of prolific goalscorers than South America or even Africa. The last two winners of the Golden Shoe, the award given to the player with the best goalscoring figures in league football in Europe, have been Uruguay's Diego Forlan and Argentina's Lionel Messi. Gonzalo Higuain, another Argentine, was the next-best behind Messi in last season's Primera Liga.

In the English Premier League, Didier Drogba, an Ivorian, topped the 2009/10 charts; in the French Ligue 1, Mamadou Niang, a Senegalese, then of Marseille, finished ahead of the rest. In Portugal's Superliga, Oscar Cardozo, a Paraguayan, outscored all others; in the Dutch Eredivisie, it was Luis Suarez, a Uruguayan. Though an Italian - the diminutive Udinese veteran Antonio di Natale - led the goalscorers in Serie A, he will not be remembered as a new Riva.

Why the apparent decline of the great European centre-forward? Tactical evolution has something do with it. Defences tend to play higher up the field, especially in the leading European leagues, so being chiefly a goal-poacher is not enough for many modern coaches; they want their No 9s to be creating openings not just in the last 20 metres of the pitch. Look at how various very ambitious clubs have treated a footballer like Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, who has throughout his career proved prolific at finding the net from inside the penalty area, but, at Real Madrid and AC Milan, was seen as insufficient - and inelegant - in his work elsewhere.

Huntelaar, who scored for Holland against Moldova on Friday, may forever suffer for that, though in a struggling Schalke team, he has scored well since moving from Milan to the German Bundesliga. One man who has been less prolific in German domestic football lately is Miroslav Klose. He is an enigma. His two goals for Germany against Turkey at the weekend took his international tally to 57 in 104 matches. That is a fine record, though the fact that for Bayern Munich he is yet to score from five games this term, and managed only three league goals in 2009/10 mitigates against thinking of Klose as a modern great.

Nor, for all his effectiveness, is he likely to be memorialised at the top of the all-time German rankings. Klose is 32, and still 13 goals short of matching Gerd Muller's astonishing 68 goals for West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s: astonishing because Muller compiled those from just 62 caps. Gerd Muller was a poacher par excellence, short, stocky, barely visible outside the confines of the opposition penalty box. But the modern game is far more likely to promote a Thomas Muller than a Gerd Muller.

It was Germany's Thomas Muller, a versatile attacking midfielder, able to play wide on the right, or behind a No 9, who, at the tender age of 20, left the last World Cup with the Golden Boot award. He had, like Villa and Wesley Sneijder - another attacking midfielder - scored five goals in the tournament. But Muller collected the prize because he had directly set up more goals for teammates than the Spaniard or the Dutchman. His skills as a creator counted in his favour, as they tend to do in most coach's assessments of a 21st century goalscorer.