David Moyes has backed Thierno Barry's potential to succeed in the Premier League. The French striker has had a difficult start to life at Everton, scoring just three goals since signing from Villarreal for £27m this summer.
Barry had to wait until the first week of December to find the back of the net for the first time in a royal blue shirt, scoring in the side’s 3-0 win over Nottingham Forest at Hill Dickinson Stadium.
He scored in the return fixture against Sean Dyche’s side while also grabbing a late goal in the 4-2 loss to Brentford at home.
The French U21 international was one of the first signings of a busy summer rebuild for the Blues. While Barry was first identified as a target by former director of football Kevin Thelwell, Moyes confirmed that the move was executed by the new recruitment team led by chief executive Angus Kinnear.
“It came from us. I think we paid £27m, and to be fair, that is not a lot of money for a centre forward. We had to go early on a young centre forward if we were going to get one,” said Moyes.
“We didn’t have £50m-£60m to buy a centre forward and we probably couldn’t have got one at that price because those ones probably wouldn’t have come to the club with us having no European football.
“We had to go early and we went for Thierno, who had scored 14 or 15 goals in his first year in La Liga. If we had waited until the second year and he had done the same, then we probably would have found he wouldn’t have come to us or we couldn’t have got him at the cost he would have been.
“We need him to step up, but he’s in his first year in the Premier League from overseas, so there is a bit of room to give him a wee bit of manoeuvre. Hopefully, it will improve.”
Beto’s struggles in front of goal have exacerbated the lack of goal threat from Barry. The Guinea-Bissau international, who took the Everton number 9 shirt over the summer, scored eight goals in the league last season, but has only scored thrice in all competitions so far this campaign.
Barry has shown signs of improvement and his link-up play, aerial duels, and first touch are better than Beto's. However, there’s plenty of room to grow physically and Barry also needs to develop a clinical edge inside the box.
He’s certainly raw in many regards and Moyes accepts that Everton wanted to get a promising striker who would improve into the finished article with time.
“We brought him here thinking that because he’s got a physicality, he’s good in the air, he can run plenty, he helps us off the ball and his goals last year certainly looked good enough to say that he’s going to continue that,” he added.
“And being young, a French U21s international who was involved in their Euros last summer, there are a lot of good things about him in terms of potential.
“In this position as a manager, sometimes these are the decisions you have to take. Some of them are a little bit of a gamble and while we’ve not got the big funds, we are probably in a position where that’s what we have to do. We are having to take a bit of a risk with quite a few players.”
Reader Comments
Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer ()
There are no responses so far to this article. Be the first to offer a comment using the form below.
Add Your Comments
In order to post a comment, you need to be logged in as a registered user of the site.
Or Sign up as a ToffeeWeb Member — it's free, takes just a few minutes and will allow you to post your comments on articles and Talking Points submissions across the site.
How to get rid of these ads and support TW
