OPINION
Everton supporters haven’t had much to keep them going during what’s been another desperately disappointing season, but Marcel Brands’s latest comments will get even the most jaded of Toffees fans salivating.
The club’s director of football was speaking recently about a player he knows well, PSV Eindhoven’s teenage starlet Mohammed Ihattaren, and he wasn’t holding back in his praise of the youngster.
“Frankly I’d like to have him at Everton tomorrow,” he told Voetbal International. “He’s so good. But I don’t think that’s the path he should take.
“If he went abroad now, he has a lot less guarantees. The step to the Premier League is really big and it can also go wrong with a talent. Now he has a trainer who sees it in him, I would say: cherish that.”
Now, clearly Brands was trying to dampen excitement with much of what he said there. But the key is in the first sentence: ‘I’d have him at Everton tomorrow’. When do you ever hear directors of football speaking in that way? It’s very rare, that’s for sure.
So much in football is cloak and dagger, with clubs not wanting to show their hands until deals are completely done. Brands, though, seemingly thinks so much of Ihattaren that he’s not afraid to admit his interest in the player.
The prospect of one of European football’s most talented young stars plying his trade at Goodison Park is exciting in the extreme. Even if it’s not likely in the immediate future, you’d have to think that Brands will make a serious pursuit of the Dutchman once he deems him ready for the Premier League.
That in itself is enough to get Toffees fans excited. Ihattaren is a huge prospect, someone made his first team debut for a giant of Dutch football in January despite only turning 17 last week. That’s incredible, and shows how highly rated he is in Eindhoven.
Everton supporters will surely be looking for anything to cling to the way this campaign is going, and Brands’s comments are just the thing to get them interested again.