Silva outlines his transfer strategy for Everton
Marco Silva has been talking in more details about his transfer strategy for Everton.
The Everton boss was quoted in the Liverpool Echo outlining his approach to any further additions to the Blues squad in this transfer window.
Silva claims that the club’s summer transfer work was largely successful and that Everton don’t need another big influx of players to continue the improvement in the team Silva believes is happening.
He says that a big splash of spending in January would be an admission that the signings in the summer had been failures.
Now at this point some Everton supporters might take issue with Silva’s optimism about the way the team is performing and whether all the arrivals in July and August have indeed been a success. Especially since the Toffees are currently sitting in the bottom half of the Premier League table!
The Blues manager also addresses pressure from supporters for the club to make specific types of players a priority, such as another striker.
He says that instead of simply buying more players because of short-term issues, (such as a new striker due to a lack of goals), the club will look to continue with the strategy that informed last summer’s transfer policy. A step-by-step approach to transforming the squad.
All this sounds reasonable enough but there are issues with it too. Let’s look at the problems Everton have had scoring goals recently.
The Toffees were scoring goals with some regularity early on this season but in recent weeks the team have drawn a blank. However even early in the season it was obvious that Everton lacked a reliable centre-forward.
The contributions of Richarlison and Gylfi Sigurdsson were major factors in the clubs early goal scoring form. Since neither of them have scored since Richarlison’s late strike against Burnley, that well has dried up.
Silva has tried Cenk Tosun, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Richarlison himself in that centre-forward position. None has yet satisfied that he can do the job, at least for the moment.
In fact Richarlison has been most effective playing up front but he has struggled recently as the quality of service to him has declined and the young Brazilian is still a developing player.
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And the decline in Richarlison’s form is a worrying mirror of what happened at his and Silva’s previous club, Watford.
It seems obvious that Tosun, for all his honest endeavour, is not a good enough player to perform to the level required for a Premier League striker. And while Calvert-Lewin does have some talent, he is raw and very inconsistent at the moment.
So however you look at it Everton are still lacking the consistent, reliable goal scorer they so obviously need.