'I keep reminding Kristjaan and Kyril' - Dave Jones opens up on Sunderland striker recruitment

Sunderland non-executive director Dave Jones has admitted that he would ideally like to see the club reinforce their striking options - but has conceded that budgetary restrictions and a competitive market do not always make recruitment easy.

The Black Cats have struggled to find a reliable goal-scorer ever since Ross Stewart departed the club for Southampton last year. Over the summer, however, they brought in Wilson Isidor on an initial loan deal from Zenit Saint Petersburg, with the Frenchman scoring five times already this season. Alongside Isidor, there have been also been signs of promise from Aaron Connolly and Eliezer Mayenda, while Ahmed Abdullahi is still yet to make his debut on Wearside.

As such, Sunderland find themselves in the relatively novel position of having genuine options at the point of attack, but during an appearance on the Not The Top 20 podcast, Jones confessed that he is always eager to add more goals to the Black Cats’ squad.

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He said: “I keep reminding Kristjaan and Kyril that Ipswich Town, I mean, how many strikers did they have last season in their promotion season? Off the top of my head, I want to say at least four maybe - maybe more than that - but they were able to rotate and you'd often see them get to 70 minutes and throw on and change their entire front line. Quite often they would be scoring goals in the 90+ minute as a result of that. So I don't think you can ever have too many [strikers] would be my view, but then I'm not the one who has to answer to the budgets at the end of the day.

“It is an issue, and it's the hardest position I think to recruit for, simply because, well, there are a couple of things on it, but one is the trend away from number nines. And I think the game is almost coming back to where it wants a number nine and it wants someone who can hold the ball up and can lead the press from the front, but also run channels, also instigate that press, have the intelligence to do that, and also be able to score the tap-in goals, but also be able to create something from nothing.

“And that is a really hard thing that you're looking for, especially when you are working on constraints of a budget. You get this different tiers of strikers, especially when you're driven by focusing on players of a certain age bracket as well - as we as a football club, as I said, make no apologies for.”

He added: “But then you've got those guys that are coming out of Premier League clubs, the ones that perhaps have struggled to make that leap with your top tier of Premier League club, the ones who've been able to have their cherry pick in terms of their academies. I'm talking about the likes of Tom Cannon, Liam Delap - even Ellis Simms. And look at the prices that these young lads are going for.

“It's very difficult for a club like us in this stage of our development to be able to fight at those levels and compete at those levels. So then you have to be a bit more creative. You have to widen your net. I think Regis [Le Bris] helped us open our eyes up to a different kind of market and obviously knows a lot of players that we weren't familiar with through his background in French youth football, as well as Ligue 1. And that helped lead us to Wilson's door.”