Sam Allardyce says Theo Walcott ‘should be at the peak of his career’ and he is an experienced goalscorer but his arrival is bad news for Everton’s youngsters
Sam Allardyc included Theo Walcott in his one and only England squad and is a manager with previous for rekindling stalled careers.
Photograph: Tony McArdle – Everton FC/Everton FC via Getty Images
Sam Allardyce believes Theo Walcott “should be at the peak of his career” at 28 and with the experience of 397 games played over a dozen years at Arsenal behind him. Should be. It is a career in need of revival instead, and a £20m relocation to Everton offers no such guarantees.
The transfer suits club and player in many respects. The squad assembled by the director of football, Steve Walsh, and former manager Ronald Koeman at Goodison Park is imbalanced. It desperately lacks pace and width, even with Yannick Bolasie available after a long-term knee injury, and there appears an obvious place for Walcott to reclaim a regular starting role in the Premier League, his form and perhaps even an England recall in World Cup year on the right of Everton’s attack.
After four successive defeats and the capitulation at Tottenham last weekend, Everton crave not only improvement up front but release from the monotony of ineffective and uninspiring football. Walcott’s goal record demonstrates he will assist in that regard. The winger, and occasional striker, scored 108 goals in Arsenal colours including 19 last season when no longer secure in the starting line-up. A shortage of goals throughout the Everton team was a frequent lament from Koeman before he paid the price for the club’s failure to replace Romelu Lukaku in the summer.
In Allardyce, who included the Arsenal winger in his one and only England squad in August 2016, Walcott is united with a manager with previous for rekindling stalled careers and a stated willingness to play the former Southampton academy product anywhere across the front line. But this is also a manager who has spent more than £40m purely on forwards in this transfer window and remarked after the 4-0 drubbing at Wembley: “I should have got back to being a bit more boring and a bit less adventurous.”
Everton did not have one shot on target in their previous two home games against Chelsea and Manchester United. Cenk Tosun, signed for an initial £21m from Besiktas, has an onerous responsibility to accompany his arrival in English football.
Allardyce argued that Walcott would “give us balance in the squad” when explaining his interest in the player last week. No one disputes that assessment, although in Ademola Lookman, Nikola Vlasic and Aaron Lennon the Everton manager had options to restore balance before the £20m transfer. However, along with Koeman and the caretaker manager David Unsworth before him, Allardyce has exacerbated the problem by shoehorning Wayne Rooney and Gylfi Sigurdsson into the same team with the same results.
Everton spent a club record £45m on Sigurdsson but have rarely deployed the Iceland international in his favoured central role and isolated him on the left. It may require a fundamental shift, one with potential implications for Rooney, the team’s leading goalscorer this season, to accommodate Walcott in a better-balanced attacking unit.
The winger’s arrival will also affect the development of the 20-year-olds Lookman and Vlasic. Allardyce offered a bleak reason for limiting the pair’s opportunities in the second half of the season, although bleak is in keeping with Everton’s entire campaign.
“We have some young players who are very attractive in terms of their abilities like Vlasic and Lookman,” the manager said last week. “But they are so young and having to play them in the first team every single week – we have already been running with four players 23 and under – is for me a risky game in terms of results. Everton needs results until such time as it is certainly safe in the Premier League. If I try to then groom those players further there is over £2m a place. You need to still try and win. Grooming a youngster then becomes even more difficult because of the money.”
Investing £20m plus around £110,000 a week in wages on Walcott is also a risk. Walcott joining a team without a coherent attack and identity represents a gamble on his part, too. It is one that must pay off for a player in search of his peak and a manager in need of adventure.