David Moyes believes the lack of a top-class centre-forward cost him a chance of winning the Premier League title with Everton and now fears Sunderland’s acute striker shortage could leave them struggling at the opposite end of the table.
With injury sidelining Fabio Borini until late December and the newly recruited free agent Victor Anichebe still some way from match fitness, Jermain Defoe is Moyes’ only fit forward for Monday’s home game against Everton .
Although too diplomatic to criticise Ellis Short, Sunderland’s owner, the manager is disappointed not to have a better stocked armoury to aid the task of turning his latest club into the “new Everton”.
Moyes is wary about “banging on too much” about the 11 years he spent at Goodison Park but comparisons between the two similarly sized clubs are irresistible and Everton remain the template for what the former Manchester United and Real Sociedad manager hopes to achieve at the Stadium of Light.
“We had a great team at Goodison but we were missing a centre-forward. We couldn’t get the finances to buy one in my last couple of years,” said Moyes, who has Sunderland’s record £13.5m signing Didier Ndong available for selection after the Gabon midfielder, signed from Lorient, solved visa problems. “I might be exaggerating but I think, with a top centre-forward, we would have been close to winning the league; we were that good.”
Not that he was minded to hurl any toys from prams. “I have to be fair,” he said. “Bill Kenwright [Everton’s chairman] was always trying to help me and every penny he had he gave me. I don’t have any complaints. It was also a brilliant education. It’s good to have a bit of money but it’s also sometimes good to realise you’ve got to get out on to the training ground and teach players, build them into a team.”
With Sunderland accruing consistent financial losses and Short singed by several bewildering buys imported by a series of managers, the American financier hopes Moyes can perform a similar feat on Wearside.
“I see Everton as a very similar club to Sunderland,” Moyes said. “When I first joined it felt like avoiding relegation every season was good enough. So we started to change that. I had a budget of £5m a year but we got there in the end. We consistently finished in the top eight.
“Sunderland aren’t going to be the biggest spenders, just like Everton weren’t. It’s going to be tough and take time – at least three or four transfer windows – but I want, in my own way, to do a Leicester here. It might not mean winning the Premier League but finishing in a high position.”
Most of Moyes’s predecessors – Moyes is Sunderland’s seventh manager in five years – bought into the mantra that players do not want to live in the north-east but he disagrees, attributing the club’s lack of pulling power to persistent instability and underachievement.
“I don’t think it’s geography,” he said. “It’s that players want to play in good teams at good clubs. We had some players who I thought would sign this summer but they didn’t want to come here. It wasn’t just to do with money and I was a bit disappointed but we have to build a good team people want to join.
“At the moment Sunderland has got everything except league position. If we’re winning regularly players will fancy coming here. I don’t know if people believe that at the moment so I have to be the one to change it.”
Sunderland (4-2-3-1, probable): Pickford; Manquillo, Koné, Djilobodji, Van Aanholt; Kirchhoff; Januzaj, Pienaar, Rodwell, Gooch; Defoe.
Everton (4-2-3-1, probable): Stekelenburg; Coleman, Williams, Jagielka, Baines; Gueye, Barry; Mirallas, Barkley, Bolasie; Lukaku.
