With Everton’s potential club record signing Yannick Bolasie, and £25m needed to pry him from Selhurst Park, eyebrows were raised as to just why Ronald Koeman and Steve Walsh were so eager to sign the charismatic winger.
Seen as an enigmatic and inconsistent wide man, the talk around the move was that of how well Crystal Palace will have done to gain a notable profit on a player whom they had reportedly signed for just £350,000 four years earlier.
A week later from the initial reports and with the transfer officially over the line, a third number 14 is set to don the royal blue in under a year and one the patrons of Goodison Park would hope to be more Naismith than Niasse.
It was clear from the get-go that those high up in the Everton hierarchy wanted to get their fourth summer signing through the door quickly and taking a quick glance at Bolasie’s stats, the data can look fairly unremarkable for such a substantial fee.
Just five goals and three assists last season doesn’t make for as easy reading as you would expect especially when compared to the two goals and eight assists recorded by Gerard Deulofeu in just over half of the minutes played.
Compound those stats with Bolasie’s preference to dribble rather than pass – a style conflicting with that of Ronald Koeman’s Southampton, a side who recorded the least dribbles per game last season – and you can see where the derisory looks heading in the Toffees direction are stemming from.
Yet, playing stats aren’t everything in the world of football. The need and desire to look for quantifiable statistics can help to see what type of player a club is bringing in and it definitely helped Evertonians in their immediate assessment of what they were getting in Idrissa Gana Gueye. Yannick Bolasie’s strengths when it comes to Everton are more than zeroes and ones.
From the first 90 minutes of Koeman’s Everton tenure, the patterns and directions asked of his side were apparent and none more than those of his forward thinking players.
Playing in a position foreign to him for a number of years, Gerard Deulofeu was asked to lead the line and stretch the back four creating space for not only himself but an onrushing Kevin Mirallas and Ross Barkley.
Whether that task is asked of Bolasie is yet to be seen but the Congolese attacker has the qualities needed to either replicate that role or that of those asked to support and that can only mean good things for Everton’s newest signing.
Another positive of the Bolasie signing is that physically, he is everything that Everton have lacked for the past two years. Standing at 6’1″, Bolasie becomes the Toffees fifth tallest outfield player. Add in his power, speed and ability to work hard both offensively and defensively and it becomes apparent that he is the prototypical signing of what Koeman wants his Everton side to be.
‘Yala’, as he is affectionately known from his time at Crystal Palace, also adds competition to Everton’s forward line. A long-term problem in L4 has been a lack of quality squad depth in certain positions. For as over saturated as positions like left back and centre midfield have been in recent times, the left-hand side of the midfield and the space behind the striker have long been neglected and Bolasie adds proven quality and competition to those places.
£25m may well be a lot of money on paper but with the way that transfers in England are heading, the price could well become the going rate for any player with years of Premier League football under his belt. Throw in Bolasie’s ability to bring the ball up the field quickly in a counter attack or jink and trick his way past a full back in a possession game and Bolasie’s worth to Everton becomes much more than simply goals and assists. Bolasie is everything that Koeman hopes Everton to be. Powerful, exciting and above all else, adaptable.
