Evanilson's deeper role turns him into Bournemouth's Firmino
Marco Rose has reshaped Evanilson's game, and the Brazilian forward's pressing and creativity against Sunderland recalled Roberto Firmino's best Liverpool years.
Evanilson scored, created and provoked a red card in Bournemouth's win over Sunderland, and the manner of it has sharpened a comparison that has followed him for weeks: he is starting to resemble Roberto Firmino.
Planet Football reported that Bournemouth paid around £40million for Evanilson, a fee decided by the club's analytics department much as a previous regime settled on £29million to sign Firmino from Hoffenheim, a club that had finished eighth in the Bundesliga.
Neither fee was fully explained at the time. Both forwards have gone on to justify the outlay less through raw output than through the way they organise an attack around themselves.
A false nine in disguise
Against Sunderland, Evanilson set up the opening goal with strength and pace before turning a hopeful long ball into a sprint past two centre-backs, a run that saw Kevin Danso sent off, according to Planet Football.
He then produced what the outlet described as the Firmino-esque moment of the afternoon: reading the danger as Bournemouth pressed, he pounced on a poor back pass from Omar Alderete, sent goalkeeper Robin Roefs the wrong way with a couple of stepovers, and rolled in a no-look finish.
None of that is simply about finishing. It is about a forward who presses as a first line of defence, drops short to combine, and only then looks to convert the space his movement has created for others.
The numbers behind the shift
Evanilson is, remarkably, the only Bournemouth player with a Premier League assist this season, and his four assists lead the entire division, Planet Football noted. That is already more than he managed in the whole of last season.
The change has come from how Marco Rose deploys him rather than any sudden leap in quality. Rose explained that Evanilson has been asked to keep possession, drop into deeper pockets, and press relentlessly, with goals arriving as a by-product rather than the sole aim.
"He keeps the ball, he's going deep, he presses. So his effort is really outstanding," Rose said, as quoted by Planet Football. "And yes, when he drops, if he plays a little bit deeper, he's still a really good player who with his technical abilities, he can give us a lot."
Rose added that Evanilson has operated across several nominal positions this season. "I'm just happy for him that he rewards himself with goals now, because he's a number nine, number nine-and-a-half, sometimes he played 10 this season, and he's always working hard for the team out of possession, in possession," he said.
That willingness to occupy a nine, a nine-and-a-half or a ten in the same campaign is precisely what made Firmino so hard to mark at his peak: no single zone contained him, and no single defender could follow him without creating space for a teammate.
Echoes of a Liverpool blueprint
Rose's assessment of Evanilson as "a good baller" with "quite good technique", per Planet Football, is modest phrasing for a player doing an increasingly convincing version of a role Jürgen Klopp once built his Liverpool attack around.
Klopp had described Firmino as "a complete offensive player" and, more specifically, as "a very important player, a connecting player, a finisher, a fighter, a defender, the first defender" — a job description built on pressing triggers, link-up play and selfless running rather than pure goal tallies.
Rose never coached Firmino at Hoffenheim, despite the overlap in clubs, but the system he has built for Evanilson draws on the same principle: a forward's value is measured as much by what he creates and disrupts as by what he scores.
Bournemouth's attack now has a focal point who can finish from a wrong-footing stepover one minute and win the ball back high up the pitch the next, and Rose's comments suggest that duality is a deliberate feature of his coaching, not an accident of Evanilson's talent.
The next test is whether the output holds up against stronger opposition than Sunderland, but the shape of the role — pressing first, creating second, scoring as the reward — is now clearly established.