“Primarily though, my major strength is my goalscoring.” “I am aware of the importance of the number nine shirt, and when I spoke with the managerhe made it very clear how important this shirt is.” - Papiss Demba Cisse

Papiss Cisse is on the edge of the populous’s lips after another breathtaking and potentially decisive strike against Chelsea. The striker has scored 12 in 12 since coming to England. Playing with a predatory instinct and a calm and confident approach has led the striker to be a massive hit Tyneside (as I predicted he would be back in December), but the mystery shrouding the player has provoked equal curiosity. Myths have started among Newcastle fans and his childhood glory has spurred supporters to create fables about Papiss scoring the moon. The reality of his life seems much more humble.

Goals for Freiburg

Little is known about his childhood in Dakar, the largest city, capital, and major port of Senegal, but when he moved to Metz in 2005 (at the age of 19) he joined their foreign school. Metz offers amnesty to players of former French protectorates as described by Graham Carr,

“I saw Papiss Cisse play for Metz when he first came over from Senegal. Metz have sort of a school, and they take quite alot of Sengalese players, but he didn’t have a passport at the time.

Teams in the Top 4 leagues were warded off of him because of the passport issue, but the talent was clearly there. He has always been a goalscoring machine: For Douanes Dakar he scored 23 in 26, for Metz he scored 36 in 95, and for Freiberg he scored 37 in 65. After being loaned around France for 2 years he came back to Metz and played for two more before accumulating the requisite time to get an EU passport.

This brought him to Germany, the second stop in his playing career. He joined the Black Forest team Freiburg for 1.6 million Euro and acquired a reputation for scoring goals out of nothing.

The club’s director Dirk Dufner told BBC

“We see potential with his skills in the Bundesliga, therefore, it was very important that we could sign him for the long term.”

Freiburg were newly promoted and Cisse scored 6 goals in his first campaign and helped the club reach 14th in the table. The next season was the first real campaign that portended to his current campaign, though, Papiss scored 24 goals in 34 appearances and almost singlehandedly willed one of the worst teams on paper to the top-half of the table.

Scoring goals with no service is dramatically different than scoring goals in a well oiled machine and Papiss showed his ability to transform a team’s hopes over the course of a season like few strikers can. Shattering the Bundesliga’s goalscoring record by an African (set by the legendary Tony Yeboah for Frankfurt in 1993) with 22 also boosted his notoriety. This is when the transfer rumors to England began, first it was heard that Arsenal and Bayern Munich were competing for his signature at £15m in the Summer, then it was Sunderland, Fulham, and Newcastle in January. Sunderland, in fact, paid for his flight to Newcastle, but Papiss joined the rival Magpies and the rest, as they say, is history. Taking the #9 shirt and scoring 13 goals in 12 matches creates tall tales.