As the man who once took Ruud van Nistelrooy’s place in his team, Salomon Rondon is certainly a striker not afraid of a challenge as he arrives at Everton to provide Rafa Benitez with an alternative to Dominic Calvert-Lewin.
Rondon’s usurping of the once-prolific Premier League marksman Van Nistelrooy came a decade ago as the 349-goal Dutchman was in his final season among the professional ranks with Spanish club Malaga.
It would therefore be unfair to expect the Venezuelan to keep the Blues’ most-prized asset – just 24 and approaching his peak years – benched for a prolonged period, especially given that it’s Rondon who is himself now something of the grizzled veteran.
What he does provide though is experienced cover for Everton in a crucial area in which they were lacking anything resembling a like-for-like replacement.
Turning 32 next month, Rondon is a proven performer in the top flight of English football and also a player who the manager himself knows well from their previous spells together at both Newcastle United and Chinese side Dalian Professional.
Although owner Farhad Moshiri remains as ambitious as ever, with the purse strings tied tight at Goodison Park in this transfer window, Benitez has had to turn to options who will give him more bang for his buck than some of the previous extravagant outlays the club have made in recent years.
While it’s obviously early days, so far the likes of Demarai Gray, Andros Townsend and even back-up goalkeeper Asmir Begovic to some extent have all looked like savvy pound-for-pound acquisitions when it comes to striking the right kind of balance for the first team squad.
Benitez will be hoping that Rondon, one of his trusted lieutenants from his previous ports of call, proves to be another addition to be placed in that category.
Certainly it’s to be hoped that he can make more of an impact than Joshua King, who came to the Blues with an impressive Premier League pedigree midway through last season to provide attacking cover but departed without a goal or even a start to his name.
With 168 goals in 485 games over his career, Rondon’s scoring return, while hardly prolific, is not too shoddy, with a better than one in three average while his Premier League statistics show 35 goals in 140 games in the competition compared to Calvert-Lewin’s 43 in 150.
This understandably relates to a higher minutes per goal figure of 333 as opposed to the Everton number 9's 281 while Rondon’s shooting accuracy percentages (42 to 53) and shooting success (10.51 to 15.3) is also lower but such discrepancies are hardly cavernous in proportions given that he’s set to be taking on an understudy role.
The area in which the new recruit’s numbers do stand out – which is apt for a player whose career has taken him from Maracay on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast to the Canary Islands, Andalusia, Tartarstan, the Black Country, Tyneside, China’s Liaoning province and most recently Moscow – is distance covered.
While Rondon’s Premier League minutes played (10,838) are only 11% more than Calvert-Lewin’s (9,746), his total distance ran is over twice as much (928km, compared to 472km).
That’s further than Goodison Park to Brighton & Hove Albion’s Amex Stadium – where Everton recorded a first-ever victory last Saturday – and back again.
Such energy levels didn’t just find favour with Benitez during Rondon’s last stint in England but with the fans of Newcastle United who voted him their player of the year for the 2018/19 season – the first striker to be awarded the accolade since a certain Alan Shearer some 16 years earlier.
What you know you are going to get with him is a physical presence as a strong and tall focal point to the frontline, willing to run through the proverbial ‘brick wall’ for Benitez.
