At first glance, to which we all have to defer occasionally, Sunderland’s move to bring Jermain Defoe back to the Premier League via Toronto FC looks very much like the kind of wonky conservatism that often afflicts relegation-threatened clubs.
The tell-tale-combination is in place: Defoe is a striker who has a goalscoring record in decline, an age noticeably on the rise and a “big name.” Placed together, these attributes could easily suggest that Sunderland manager Gus Poyet has foolishly decided to trust a new striker not because of what he can do now but because of what he used to be able to do.
And yet that “first glance” angle has got to be a harsh one. Because in making any criticism as dismissive as the one I’ve just suggested, you should probably have an alternative course of action lined up—whereas for Sunderland and Poyet, it’s hard to come up with one better than signing Defoe. The key question is: What else was Sunderland supposed to do? And there aren’t many easy answers.
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Sunderland’s move for Defoe makes far more sense within the context of genuine desperation which it occupies. Poyet’s team can’t score. It’s scored fewer goals than anyone in the Premier League apart from Aston Villa, which must be on minus-goals by now. The situation is that a manager has somehow ended up with a squad full of strikers who can’t score and he’s been given a month to rectify that. In a crowded market, short on quality at the lower end (as I explained last week), there are very few strikers available with any kind of proof that they could rectify anything other than a gap in a club wage bill.
So Sunderland has done what Leicester City, Hull City and almost every other bottom-half club wanted to do and signed Defoe, the best hope with which it could come up. A guy who’s scored often in the Premier League before now has become available and who is certainly willing to give it a go. It’s still a risk, but it’s not exactly one taken by choice. Because, again, what else could Sunderland do? Who were the decent alternatives?
That’s how we have to frame Defoe’s Premier League return if we’re to do it fairly. And once we’ve established a little bit of sympathy for Poyet’s decision, you can even start to imagine reasons for this move coming off.
Sunderland can, theoretically, be made to suit the 32 year-old goal-poacher, Defoe. He’ll start most games, as he did on Saturday at Tottenham, either playing off another striker—Steven Fletcher—or at least with one very close to him—Conor Wickham. He’ll be given crosses from a renewed Adam Johnson and an emerging Patrick Van Aanholt, and set pieces will come in from one of the best in the business, Sebastian Larsson. In short, there are potential assist-makers in this team, even if they haven’t been making many recently.
What could really play into Defoe’s hands, though, is that he was signed out of desperation, but not naivety. Sunderland and Poyet will not have misunderstood the player Defoe is when they signed him: they’ll have known that he doesn’t run around much, that he’s not brilliant at holding up the ball (or that interested in it) and that he tends to shoot rather than pass. He’s arrived with all of that accepted in advance, because Sunderland needs anyone who can score goals and it is, evidently, willing to compromise on almost everything else.
Those are pretty cosy circumstances for any striker, particularly one who, like new West Bromwich Albion manager Tony Pulis, arrives to “save” a club that is not actually in the relegation zone at the moment of his arrival. They mean that although there’s pressure on Defoe, there’s also a pretty free shot at getting goals in this team.
I still retain my “first glance” scepticism for the idea that a 32 year-old who’s spent time away from the Premier League, wasn’t scoring much before he left and hasn’t scored a lot since, will be able to reanimate a club that has taken such a zombiefied approach to the opening half of the season. But the reality is that even if the hope he can turn things around for Sunderland represents a degree of clutching at straws, at the very least there are some straws to clutch with Defoe, rather than without him.
Without him, Hull City so far has no-one and Leicester City has just signed Andrej Kramarić from FC Rijeka. Both would surely prefer the accusations of “conservatism” that can be levelled at Sunderland to their current striker-situations. We’ll see if that’s right or wrong over the coming months.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter
