The World Cup winner who Régis Le Bris wants his Sunderland squad to take inspiration from in striker debate

Régis Le Bris has been encouraged by Eliezer Mayenda’s start to the season but says he wants the whole squad to carry the goalscoring burden.

Mayenda has two goals and two assists from the opening four matches of the campaign, a reflection of his rapid improvement over the pre-season period under Le Bris. The striker topic has dominated discussion at Sunderland for a prolonged period but Le Bris insists that it shouldn’t revolve around goals.

Most important to Le Bris is the general contribution to the team made by his centre forward and it is here where Mayenda has arguably been most impressive, pressing from the front and offering good link-up play when the Black Cats counter.

To underline his point, the Sunderland head coach made reference to fellow Breton and World Cup winner Stéphane Guivarc'h.

“The subject of the striker could be redefined, I think,” Le Bris said.

“It’s not just one player who is involved to score. The responsibility has to be shared. Yes, there is a striker, but there is also the left winger, the right winger, the offensive midfielder. Maybe there are the others too. There are many teams who have won big trophies by sharing their goals around. For example, the French team won the World Cup in 1998 and their main forward, Stephane Guivar’ch didn’t score. He didn’t score a single goal in the whole competition, but they won and he was very useful for the team. The other players scored. That could be part of the way we have to think about our striker here. It’s not a huge responsibility he [Mayenda] is carrying. It is a big responsibility, but he is still young. I hope he will score 20 or 25 goals. Maybe that will happen, maybe it won’t be the case. But Jobe can score, Riggy can score, Browney can score, Patrick can score and so on. That is the idea – we want to share things around now.”

While Sunderland have confirmed that Ahmed Abdullahi will be missing for around ten to twelve weeks following groin surgery, Le Bris is confident that he has the options required for the coming months even acounting for possible fatigue or a dip in form for a player in Mayenda is still very inexperienced.

“It is clear he [Mayenda] is a high-potential player, and when you give this kind of player the right opportunities, they can grow very quickly,” he said.

“The dynamic is not always stable, because they are still young. I hope it will be stable, but it could be unstable and, if that is the case, we will find other solutions with Naz or with Wilson, for example, who could offer different things in that position. We have many options at the moment.”