Everton Fan View: Niasse makes Koeman and fans eat humble pie

Ronald Koeman didn’t want Oumar Niasse in the team. He wanted the player out of the club and not to be a part of his plans. He was demoted to the under 23’s and didn’t even have his own locker.

Almost exactly a year after making those comments, Niasse scores two goals to rescue Everton and, ironically, the career of Koeman. The player the manger so quickly disregarded provided a huge win for the struggling manager. If Koeman wasn’t prepared to eat his humble pie before, he is now.

He was wrong, and he’s starting to see it. How good Niasse will be as a regular 90 minute striker remains to be seen, but he has already proved that he deserves a place in the squad at the very least. He showed at Hull and is now starting to show at Everton that he can be effective. Maybe all it took was a little bit of confidence.

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We’ve all seen players come in and out of form, Niasse started badly at Everton. He wasn’t given a chance to overcome that. The £13.5m spent on him no longer looks ridiculous. In the current market, we’d probably already get that back. That seemed almost impossible such a short time ago.

Koeman was wrong, but the fans were too. When he made those comments that were so dismissive, fans praised him for his ruthlessness. He was the anti-Martinez and that’s just what Everton needed to get rid of the deadwood. Everton fans didn’t give Niasse a chance.

Signed under a cloud

Part of that is due to him being a Martinez signing when Martinez’ popularity at Everton was in the gutter. The manger most people wanted sacked just spent £13.5m of our precious money on a complete waste of space. That’s what we thought, and did for a long time.

Fans are fickle, and Niasse deserved a fair chance. He’s recovered from that, and proved everyone wrong. It would be understandable if he resented Everton, and the fans, he clearly doesn’t. Instead he appreciated to opportunity Everton gave him in the Premier League.

How good can Niasse be for Everton? Well we are going to find out as he’s earned his chance. A lot of people, including Koeman, didn’t think that was possible. He was written off to early, It’s clearly a lesson that you can’t make a judgement on a player after 152 minutes of competitive football. That’s what he had at Everton before being loaned to Hull.

Koeman desperately needed a striker, he turned to the man he tried to get rid of. The manager has to eat some humble pie, and for a stubborn man, he must hate that. The fans need to eat their words too. We pride ourselves on supporting whoever wears that blue shirt, Niasse didn’t get that support. We didn’t deserve for the stadium to go into delirium when he scored the winner in front of the Gwladys Street, but that’s exactly what we did. Here’s to many more servings of humble pie for all, smugly served up by Oumar Niasse.