Farewell to Zaza

So farewell Zaza, who is being returned to sender after Christmas. Though to borrow Brian Williams' joke, perhaps we've been a bit harsh on him as no-one realised he was 99. Or was that Zsa Zsa Gabor? As with the late Zsa Zsa, signing on the dotted line has proved expensive for suitors. It's said that West Ham paid £5 million to sign Simone Zaza on loan and it was also reported the club had paid £4 million to sign Jonathan Calleri on another loan deal. The figures might be exaggerated, but if true that's an astonishing £9 million to simply loan a pair of uniquely non-productive strikers. For that price alone we could have actually bought outright a Charlie Austin or Dwight Gayle.

The clause that obliged West Ham to sign Zaza for a further £20 million after 14 games put unnecessary pressure on club and player and he's proved unable to cope with Premier League football. After several unproductive starts Zaza had a decent-ish game at Palace but then Bilic dropped him for the Chelsea game and hit upon using Antonio as a striker. There were a couple of unconvincing appearances as a sub against Everton and Man United and then he got injured. Simone has only made six starts for the Hammers (and five sub appearances) with no goals and it's all been a disaster. 

The manager and chairmen appeared to fall into the trap of signing someone based on a decent-ish spell in the European Championships (bar that penalty) and the belief that if someone plays for Juventus then they must be world class. But actually most of Zaza's goals were scored while on loan at Sassuolo and Ascoli, while he's only hit the net for Juventus five times in 19 appearances. Looking at his statistics he just doesn't have the record of scoring consistently for a top club over several seasons that should be necessary to make a striker worth £25 million. He might come good in a different league, but he should never have been in the £25 million bracket. Ironically Zaza proved a lot worse than what we already had in Andy Carroll and Diafra Sakho.