Middlesbrough loan lifeline for Yannick Bolasie?

Another transfer window approaches and once again both Yannick Bolasie and the Everton fans will be hoping that the player can secure a move away, for his own career’s sake.

After a high profile move to the Toffees from Crystal Palace in the summer of 2016 for the eyewatering sum of £29 million, the DR Congo international has seen his progress stall due to a horrific injury to the extent that he trains with the Under-23s nowadays and has been unable to break into the Everton squad, and neither has he been able to get a transfer.

A late bid in October early in the 2020-21 season from Middlesbrough failed to get resolved in time, but the Northern Echo are reporting that the Teesside club could be preparing for another loan attempt of the 31-year-old.

Bolasie fell out of the Blues first team in 2018, and since then has had a series of semi-fruitful loans at Aston Villa, Anderlecht in Belgium and Sporting Clube de Portugal, but none of them turned into anything permanent primarily because of the astronomical wages he is on at Everton as part of the four-year deal he signed that will expire at the end of this current season.

Boro sit in mid-table in the Championship though not completely out of touch of the promotion spots, and Warnock wants owner Steve Gibson to come up with some funds to bring in a couple of loan players during the January transfer window.

Michael Zemanek / BPI

Warnock knows Bolasie personally from their time together at Palace, and remains an outspoken fan of the player.

“I’d have Yannick tomorrow, everybody knows that. But I don’t know whether there are conversations going on at the moment.

“I hope it can be done. I’ve not heard anything at the moment, but Steve knows we need a bit of help in those positions. You look at the teams we’re playing against, and most of them have got good wide players. We need a bit of help in that respect, and hopefully we can come up with something.

“We need attacking wide players that are going to create goals. If you told me I couldn’t do anything else but get two wide players, I’d be okay with that because that’s the priority.”

The Boro manager shed some light also on what happened to cause the October loan to fall through, indicating he blamed Bolasie and his agent and that ‘things we should have known’ had not been revealed until very late on in the process. Whether that is something to do with his cruciate ligament rupture and subsequent return to fitness is not known at the moment.

The Lyon-born winger has featured for Everton a total of 32 times, scoring twice and picking up four assists, and remains active on the social media channels engaging Toffees online in mostly good-natured chatter.