Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Oli McBurnie and Ross Stewart are in scoring form for their clubs
BBC Scotland's chief sports writerPublished54 minutes agoIt's a problem as old as the hills. A conundrum for Scotland head coach Steve Clarke as the days count down to the World Cup.
Back-to-back games without a goal now, a pair of blanks against Japan and Ivory Coast. Che Adams and Lyndon Dykes - the main men; willing, hard-working, great servants but hardly threatening.
A successful qualifying campaign that featured other-worldly strikes from Scott McTominay, Kenny McLean and one from Kieran Tierney that was just about of this planet, but a campaign, also, during which Clarke's two favourite strikers recorded just seven shots on target across six games.
Adams accounted for six of them with two goals in 446 minutes. Dykes had one attempt on target in half a dozen games - 171 minutes - and he put it away. Credit to him, sort of.
Blame those around them for not providing, or blame the strikers for not being in the right places at the right times, or for wasting the morsels that came their way, but whatever way you dice it, this is one of the burning issues for Scotland.
Can Clarke change his options front? Does he even want to? And, if he does, is he even looking in the right places?
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Clarke has taken Scotland to two European Championships and they've scored three goals in six games in those tournaments, one of them an own goal against Germany and another from a Scott McTominay shot against Switzerland that found the net only after a huge deflection.
Only one Scottish player has scored directly in any of those group games - Callum McGregor against Croatia in Clarke's first Euros.
The concern, therefore, is that Clarke doesn't see fit to shake things up, to gamble a little. As a creature of habit, we could almost predict which way he's going to go on all of this.
He'll have five or six strikers/wingers in his squad - Che Adams, Lawrence Shankland, Lyndon Dykes, George Hirst, Tommy Conway and Ben Gannon-Doak. He knows them, he trusts them and it would be a huge surprise if he doesn't pick them.
The hope - forlorn, most likely - is that he still has an open mind on one or maybe two positions in that lot.
Comparing levels is not easy. How does a goal in the Scottish Premiership compare to a goal in the English Championship or Italy's Serie A? And how about the relative strength of the team it's scored for against the team it's scored against?
A Shankland goal against the Old Firm versus an Adams goal against Roma, currently sixth in the table. How do you weigh them up?
Crudely, if you constructed a league table of Clarke's options at centre-forward based on this season's tallies of goals scored, minutes-per-goal and goals-per-shots in club football then this is how it would read.
First - Ross Stewart of Southampton. Second - Oli McBurnie of Hull City. Third - Lawrence Shankland of Heart of Midlothian. Fourth - George Hirst of Ipswich Town. Fifth - Kieron Bowie of Hibernian and now Hellas Verona. Sixth - Che Adams of Torino. Seventh - Tommy Conway of Middlesbrough. Eighth - Lyndon Dykes of Birmingham City and now Charlton Athletic.
On Wednesday evening, Stewart scored for Southampton, currently fourth in the English Championship but only three points off an automatic promotion spot to the Premier League.