Weaknesses:
His hold-up play needs work. At Villa, he’s often found himself as the lone forward on more than one occasion and teams have sometimes managed to mark him out of the game. If a striker of Benteke’s size and strength can’t hold on to the ball then it’s going to prevent his teammates from getting up in support of him. With players such as Coutinho and Firmino around him and looking to feed off his touches, this needs to be improved.
He also gets caught offside more often than you like to see. Between that and his failure to get back and help the defence, it’s easy to see why Belgium manager Marc Wilmots once described him as a pole. Following a Euro 2016 qualifying defeat against Wales earlier this year, he told Goal: “Benteke was isolated. I then played with two strikers, but they [Benteke and Romelu Lukaku] need more crosses. We asked them to get to the front post, but they stand there like two poles. We still have work to do.”
In schoolboy terms that’s known as a goal-hanger…
