Sam Allardyce has warned Jermain Defoe the days of specialist goal-poachers are long gone. He will also tell the former England striker that Sunderland’s position near the foot of the Premier League dictates he cannot wait for the forward to play himself back into top form.
The 33-year-old was Sunderland’s major signing from FC Toronto in January but has struggled to establish himself. Dick Advocaat tended to field a player who has scored six goals in his 20 appearances in wide roles in a 4-3-3 formation before omitting Defoe from his final games in charge.
Now Advocaat’s successor faces the challenge of making the most of the former West Ham and Tottenham forward. “There is always a place for a goalscorer but you cannot just be a goalscorer today so I don’t know if that’s something we need to address with Jermain,” Allardyce said. “He came here and has not played as much as he would have liked.”
The role he chooses for Sunderland’s highest-paid player promises to be intriguing.
“That really lies with performance analysis, doesn’t it?” Allardyce said. “You analyse everyone’s performance and you look at the contribution they make on a game-to-game basis and you can judge with your eyes as well with your experience. Then you come to a decision on who is best equipped at that moment in time of playing in your team.
“Players who don’t play generally don’t play because they drop themselves, not because you have dropped them.
“If a player has not done as much as he did at the top of his game, then you talk to the player and say: ‘Look, be careful. You are not quite playing. Is there any problem? And if you have a problem, can I resolve it for you? Is it stopping you playing as well as you have been playing because you are not quite there?’”
After the compassion, comes the manager’s warning. “I tell the player: ‘There are not many opportunities for me to wait for you to come good,’” Allardyce added.
“When I played I used to say: ‘A few more games and I’ll come good,’ but here at Sunderland, we ain’t got a few more games. We have got this week to try to win the first game [at West Bromwich Albion on Saturday] and after that it becomes ever more difficult to win it if we don’t.”
