Derby County could repeat David McGoldrick transfer trick after Dwight Gayle answers promotion SOS

Dwight Gayle at Derby County

If you had scoured social media over the last fortnight then you will know that an update on Dwight Gayle’s location was never far away.

First, it was his Range Rover being photographed heading to Pride Park, then it was a screengrab of some messages claiming he was eating at the Harvester before he was finally spotted on tour heading to Derby County’s training ground. His private number plate is hard to miss, but it did reach the stage where you wondered if some fans would soon be found hiding at the bottom of his garden.

We can all laugh, but jokes aside in the game of ‘Did you catch sight of Dwight’, the pursuit of the former Newcastle striker is serious business. After James Collins was ruled out for eight weeks because of a knee injury, Derby have had to act after they went into the Stevenage game with not one fit and available striker.

The situation was dire, but it is likely to improve in the next few weeks given Martyn Waghorn and Conor Washington are due to return from their calf and ankle injuries. Even then, there are doubts over their reliability to stay fit which means that Gayle has been parachuted into Derby’s squad at a critical time of the season.

Given the striker is 34, Paul Warne will not be daft enough to expect he is getting the Gayle of 10 years ago when he was carving through defences with explosive pace for Crystal Palace. Neither are we likely to see the West Brom version that scored a remarkable 23 goals in 39 Championship appearances during a wonderful loan spell from Newcastle in 2018-19.

What we will undoubtedly get with Gayle, however, is experience. With that comes composure and amid the drama of a promotion race, that could be pivotal. It looks like a shrewd signing in that respect because if you look at the division’s summit, there are a few teams that are not coping particularly well with the pressure and we are only in February.

But whatever Gayle will bring to the team through his experience, players are judged on the tangibles and in this case, it will be goals. There has been plenty of opinion over the last few days, most notably from non-Derby fans, claiming that his miserly record at Stoke does not offer compelling evidence that he can replace Collins’ output.

We live in an age, however, when players are often written off before they have pulled on a shirt and you may recall how David McGoldrick was hardly prolific when he arrived at Derby in the summer of 2022. In his final season at Sheffield United, and as much as he was respected and adored at Bramall Lane, he had only scored twice.

When he signed, he was also in his mid-30s but would go on to score more than 20 goals in what was his first and only season before he broke hearts at Derby by moving to Notts County.

But the reason he was so good in League One was that his brain was still operating at an elite level even though the legs were not as quick as they once were. And so there is this hope that Gayle can follow a similar path. Given he has played in the top two tiers for the majority of his career and amassed more than £16m in transfer fees, he should have too much upstairs for defences in the third tier.

With Nathaniel Mendez-Laing racking up assists and Max Bird in red-hot form in his role as a number 10, he is also not exactly walking into a team that does not create chances. Only Peterborough have scored more goals than Derby in the league and that has been achieved when a large proportion of their strikeforce has been missing.

But ultimately with Collins now absent, there is a lot at stake for both Gayle and Derby in the months ahead. Gayle needs a good spell after his frustrations at Stoke and Derby desperately need a focal point to their attack. They both need each other in what everybody hopes is a successful and glorious marriage come May.

In the end, though we are all asking the same question: Could a more refined version of Gayle essentially be a McGoldrick 2.0 from now until the end of the season? It will be fascinating to find out.

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