Everton are crying out for a striker in the here and now who can put away chances for fun, having been previously been blessed with the blistering goalscoring exploits of Romelu Lukaku.
It hasn’t just been this season in isolation where the Premier League titans have been cursing their options up top, though.
Former Toffee Dominic Calvert-Lewin often spurned chances galore when he was still on the books of the Merseyside outfit, before he was let go of this summer for Leeds United to snap up his hit-and-miss services on a free transfer.
David Moyes and Co must have thought getting rid of their former number 9 – who had been situated in Merseyside for a whopping 273 games – was going to be a re-energising experience.
Yet, Beto has now seemingly been handed over the baton from Calvert-Lewin as a wasteful centre-forward Everton fans can’t get on-board with, with the former Udinese man extremely lucky to still be in Moyes’ first-team plans.
Why Beto must be replaced
Everton fans, weirdly, have very little to complain about their team’s attacking department. That is until you hit the centre-forward spot on the pitch.
Indeed, Jack Grealish looks back to his devastating Aston Villa peak for the Toffees, with five goal contributions already collected this season from nine outings. At the same time, Iliman Ndiaye’s trickery and pace proved to be a real handful for Manchester City to contain last time out.
This sharp ability to unnerve defenders with his directness has even seen analyst Ben Mattinson label the Senegal international as a “creator of chaos”.
One of Ndiaye’s trademark bursts forward nearly gifted the Merseyside outfit a shock 1-0 lead at the Etihad, only for Beto to skew an effort wide after all of the 25-year-old’s hard work went to waste.
This has been the unfortunate tale of the Lisbon-born striker’s season, in truth, with Beto now going without goal since bagging at Molineux back at the tail-end of August.
Games since scoring
6
Starts since scoring
4
Minutes since scoring
354 mins
It’s now been a disastrous 354 minutes since the 6-foot-4 marksman last fired home an effort for Moyes’ men, and with Thierno Barry also failing to spark into life up top as a summer recruit, the Scotsman could now be prepared to think outside of the box in uncovering a clinical striker.
How Everton could fix their striker problem
The Glaswegian hasn’t looked uneasy this season when shoving Tyler Dibling into first-team action.
Amazingly, Dibling is still only 19 years of age, but if feels as if he’s been in and around the pinnacle of English football for a long while, with two goals and one assist next to his name from 37 appearances at the very top.
He is yet to get off the mark for Moyes’ men from his minimal first team chances, but if the ex-West Ham United boss is willing to gamble on the £40m starlet here and there, he could also be prepared to unleash U21 goal machine Braiden Graham into the first team picture shortly, as he tries to desperately find any viable solution to the frustrating Beto situation that’s continuing to unfold.
Graham might well even be Moyes’ next Rooney-style story, with the Northern Irish teenager only 17 years of age.
That is just one year older than Rooney was when first being handed a senior chance for the first time. The rest is, of course, history, on Rooney’s end, with Graham already being dubbed as a “deadly finisher” by his ex-Linfield boss in David Healy, despite still being a wide-eyed youngster.
Everton U21s
17
7 + 3
Linfield
14
2 + 0
Everton U18s
14
8 + 2
He has gone on to be potent for the Merseyside giants at both U21 and U18 level, as well, with 15 strikes now collected from 31 appearances on the youth pitches at Everton.
It’s not just Healy in isolation who has been complimentary, either, with his U21s boss in Paul Tait also going out of his way to laud the Ballygowan-born forward as a “cool” finisher under pressure.
While it could be deemed as a step way too soon for Graham to be chucked into the senior mix, it’s surely a decision worth exploring from Everton’s point of view, with Beto not anywhere near the levels expected of him at the moment.
