Steve Evans' plan for Rotherham United striker Sam Nombe next season
STEVE Evans' mission this pre-season is to bring the 'gallusness' back to Sam Nombe's game.
Never heard of it? Don't worry. It's a Glasgow thing, a term hailing from the city north of the border where Rotherham United's manager grew up.
It means to be ‘bold, daring, reckless’.
Striker Nombe was all of those things when he was in League One with Exeter City, yet not really any of them after he'd moved up to the Championship with the Millers last summer as the club's first-ever seven-figure signing.
The 25-year-old managed only three goals as Rotherham's season of struggle culminated in relegation.
However, Evans, who returned in April for a second spell in the AESSEAL New York Stadium hot-seat, remembers the cavalier attacker who hit the back of the net 17 times the year before for the third-tier Grecians.
“He was excellent in League One, wasn’t he, a talisman for Exeter,” said the Scot.
“He was a kid with the biggest smile and he had so much exuberance and confidence. He also had the Glasgow word I use, a bit of gallusness, about him, a bit of a swagger.
“That seems to have gone away a little bit, so we are going to work hard with Sam to create that again.”
Nombe arrived at New York late in the summer transfer window as then-manager Matt Taylor raided the club whom he'd left to move to New York.
Taylor used the £1-million-plus figure raised by the sale of Ben Wiles to finance the deal which more than doubled Rotherham's transfer record.
Evans said: “If you are a manager and you go back to your previous club and convince someone to pay well over seven figures, then you have to have a real belief that the boy can produce it.”
And, like Taylor before him, the new manager believes the boy can.
Evans reckons last season's paltry tally wasn't entirely the fault of the centre-forward himself and that he can rediscover his prolific form.
A stunning strike - a silky turn and a bending shot into the top corner - in the last-day 5-2 win over Cardiff City in May gave an exciting glimpse of the player's latent talent.
“Sam lives on getting chances and creativity in the final third,” Evans said. “Perhaps, the rest of the team, collectively, weren't able to find and get him in those areas.
“Our job is to get him fitter, sharper and get back all the mobility he had in League One.”
Goals to come for Nombe, then. And scored in a gallus way.