Despite a flurry of Champions League goals, it’s been a difficult start to life in Manchester for their young striker, Rasmus Højlund. After he scored his first Premier League goal, Musa Okwonga writes about how this may just be the start of something.

At long last, Manchester United’s Rasmus Højlund scored his first Premier League goal, a painfully public rite of passage that took him until winter of his debut season. This moment, a winning goal at home against a reborn Aston Villa, signals the end to an avalanche of memes that were unleashed in his direction across various online platforms, but it is also an opportunity to reflect on something: how hard scoring goals at the elite level actually is.

Given the amount of money spent on forwards, this should be an obvious point. But - judging by the incredulity when a player goes months without finding the net - it possibly isn’t. Even the legendary Kenny Dalglish has struggled to score, once getting only eight goals in 34 games in the 1980-81 league season, before recovering his form and then becoming a foil for the equally magnificent Ian Rush.

Elite athletes - and especially strikers - are the unluckiest of artists, because everyone sees their worst work. If you’re a writer, then your poorly-written drafts can stay hidden on your laptop, safe from the eyes of a judgmental public; if you’re a singer, then you can keep your out-of-key rehearsals confined to the studios, well away from the ears of a wincing audience. For people like Højlund, though, everything is on display. Maybe that’s why we pay so much to watch footballers do what they do: because, at some level, we are all fascinated by the prospect of watching others experience humiliation in their day jobs. (This probably also explains the enduring popularity of The Office.)

Thanks to social media, a reminder of your humiliations is never far away. By the time a hapless striker arrives home from another stressful day at the stadium, having guaranteed yet one more opposing goalkeeper a night of peaceful sleep, they will find that a compilation of that afternoon’s misses has already travelled to the digital equivalent of Jupiter and back. It may even have travelled via every family WhatsApp group. The striker will then have to go out there and show their face, week after week. Only the truly resilient can do that without resorting to wearing a balaclava in public.

Yes, of course, comes the reply, but that’s why they are paid all that money. Well, yes, I reply; but also, no. As a child playing in your back garden, you do not fantasise about all the open goals or similarly straightforward chances that you are going to miss in front of millions of viewers, maybe even in the most important matches of your career. You just don’t think that it will happen to you.

Being an elite striker therefore involves being a little childlike: it’s a constant search for the return to innocence, to the early days at the local pitch or playing surface when goals came easily as mineral water from a spring. To thrive like, say, Samuel Eto’o or Sam Kerr or Sergio Aguero, you have to embody that famous Winston Churchill quote, which is that “success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”.

The best thing that can be said for Højlund, and which bodes well for his future at his club, is that he never visibly lost his enthusiasm. There are plenty before him who did - Chelsea’s Mateja Kezman, for example, who was superb for four straight seasons at PSV before one disastrous season at Chelsea saw him plummet forever from those heights. At least Højlund has not been alone in his Premier League toils: at time of writing Richarlison has managed only six goals in 42 league games for Tottenham Hotspur, while his former team-mate Dominic Calvert-Lewin - someone who seems to have all the technical attributes of a first-rate striker - has scored only 10 times in 48 league games.

A fascinating thing about strikers who don’t score goals is that a streak of poor and even atrocious form can happen to absolutely anyone. It’s as baffling as watching Stephen Hawking mess up a piece of basic arithmetic, or seeing Nigella Lawson forget how to boil an egg. Barcelona’s Aisisat Oshoala is one of the finest finishers the world has produced, and yet a couple of seasons ago she was still sparing relieved defenders in the Champions League. Fellow Barcelona forward Robert Lewandowski, on his way to a golden boot and a league title in his debut season, spurned chances that were unimaginable when at his ruthless best.

Whisper it lightly, too, but even Brazil’s Ronaldo - regarded by many as the greatest in his position of all time - missed the simplest of opportunities in the first half of the 2002 World Cup Final against Germany. Of course, this rare blemish on his exemplary record was forever overshadowed by the two goals he would score in the second. Thankfully for Højlund, he has already proven his pedigree in the Champions League, with five goals in the group stage as Manchester United were eliminated: that feat alone should buy him a season’s grace.

Worst of all, though, the struggling striker represents the greatest tragedy of all: the human being who is overwhelmed by the weight of their own beautiful dreams. How painful it must be to strive your entire professional life to step onto the grandest stages, only to realise as the curtains fall open that you are terrified of the size of your audience. Højlund has taken his first relieved step away from that fate; but, even if he never had, he should have been applauded for making the attempt.

Rasmus Højlund, the Surviving Striker