If Everton were hoping to finally get Cenk Tosun off the payroll in January, Sam Allardyce’s dramatic return to the Premier League could hardly have come at a better time.
After all, it was ‘Big Sam’ who brought the £27 million benchwarmer to Goodison Park in the first place, almost two years ago.
“We looked at the qualities of the player, his talent and goalscoring, and his resilience too,” Allardyce said at the time, as reported by IB Times.
“For the price, he is the best in Europe at the moment.’
It’s fair to say those comments have aged about as well as the Limp Bizkit-inspired, ‘nu metal’ wave of the late 1990s.
Tosun hasn’t come close to justifying that staggering price tag – or his £60,000-a-week wages – at Goodison Park. The Turkey international has played just half an hour of league football this season.
But the now-West Bromwich Albion boss obviously saw something special in Tosun.
And it’s easy to see why. In his final two-and-a-half years at Besiktas, Tosun found the net 55 times in 114 games, firing the Istanbul giants to a pair of Super Lig titles.
There were even four goals in six Champions League matches during the first half of 2017/18.
Deep down, Allardyce will know finding a natural-born goalscorer could be the difference between survival and relegation. West Brom hope to pull off another great escape reminiscent of those 2005 Hollywood heroics under Bryan Robson.
Could the Tosun-Allardyce partnership finally bear fruit?
Here’s what some fans had to say about the situation on Twitter:
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