Was selling Yakubu the worst call of David Moyes' Everton career?

By David Anderson

Published 11:29 12/12/11

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I would never dispute David Moyes' man management skills, given everything he has achieved with his players, but I can't help but wonder if he has any regrets over Yakubu.

Moyes' decision to offload Yakubu on transfer deadline day to Blackburn does not look like the best call of his Everton career, given the striker's form for Rovers.

Yakubu is sixth in the list of Premier League marksmen with nine in 10, including all four against Swansea the other week.

He has 10 from his 13 games for Blackburn and goodness knows how much deeper in the mire Steve Kean's side would be without him.

Yakubu would not be such an issue if Everton were scoring, but they're not.

They've managed just 15 Premier League goals and the paucity of their attack was illustrated by Saturday's defeat at Arsenal.

Moyes played for 12 minutes without a recognised striker before throwing on home-grown 19-year-old Conor McAleny for his debut.

Moyes can't rely on Louis Saha anymore and the Frenchman is either injured or anonymous most of the time.

I still believe Apostolos Vellios can make it and he is Everton's top scorer with three goals, but he can't be expected to shoulder most of the goalscoring burden at this early stage of his career.

It doesn't help that Tim Cahill is enduring the worst goal drought of his prolific Blues career - the Aussie hasn't netted a club goal in 12 months.

None of this is news to Moyes and he has known for a couple of seasons now that he needs a reliable striker to bang in 15-odd goals a season.

The problem is he doesn't have the money to splash out the sort of cash such a player would cost in the transfer market.

Yet he had such a player in Yakubu, but got rid of him because he felt he could not get any more out of him.

The Nigerian was a reputation for being less-than-industrious, although he would deny this.

Whatever faults Yakubu had - real or perceived - Moyes had clearly had enough of him and decided it best to get him off the wage bill and raise a bit of cash from his sale.

Fair enough, and Moyes acted in the best interests of the team.

But Yakubu's form at Blackburn begs the question of why Kean could get him motivated and scoring again when Moyes couldn't?

I think every Evertonian would like to know the answer to that one.

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