Second £1m Striker signs long term deal.
With the football season less than two weeks away concerns were growing amongst Dons fans that we were noticeably light up front with new signing Max Watters just about our only striker with any sort of proven record, and our next best being Chelsea graduate 21-year-old Charlie Brown who had less than 400 minutes match experience and 3 senior goals and most of that from the bench.
But today all that is forgotten when the Dons announced the long-term signing of 27-year-old Mo Eisa from Peterborough United.
In June 2019, the 6ft tall Sudanese born striker became the Posh record signing, and by November of the same year he had scored 12 of Peterborough’s 39 league goals.
At the end of last season Peterborough put Eisa up for sale and many believed that Peterborough would be searching to recover some of their £1 million pound outlay which would have certainly ruled us out of contention, in fact it was only a few days ago that Posh Chairman Darragh MacAnthony had said we were not in the race to sign him.
Whatever has happened in the last few days it is doubtful that the Dons have broken their own transfer record achieved when Kieran Agard signed from Bristol City or we feel that would have been announced, but what we can say with a degree of certainty is that the Dons have used some of the Scott Fraser transfer money to get this deal over the line, and it is likely that the Dons have had to agree with a certain amount of add ons, but if Eisa fulfils his potential and can adjust to the MK Way it could be an excellent bit of business, and it looks that once again Russ, Luke and Liam Sweeting have again come up trumps.
We hardly dare say it but if the likes of Will Grigg did come back on loan for the season many will be casting more than a glance at the playoff spots this season, well we can hope, stranger things have happened, but I’m sure many of us now feel we can sleep a bit easier when thinking about our strike force after we have had to look on jealously for some time at some of the signings other League 1 clubs have made.
For the record Mo began playing at the Pro Touch Academy but suffered some early knock backs in his career with failed trails at Norwich City, Southend United and Oxford United and so spent time in non-league football with Dartford, Leatherhead, VCD Athletic, Corinthian, and Greenwich Borough, for the latter scoring 57 goals in 100 appearances.
In July 2017 he signed a 1-year deal at Cheltenham Town and just a month later signed a contract extension as he started to knock in the goals. By March he equalled the club record for goals in a season, and then went on to beat it comfortably by recording a 25-goal haul, a feat that also saw him awarded the League 2 player of the month for April and receive a nomination for League 2 player of the year. Although he did not collect that accolade, he did clean up at the club’s end of season awards winning the Supporters POTY, the Players POTY, and the Sponsors POTY.
In the pre-season he was linked to Brentford, Leeds United and Portsmouth but eventually signed for Bristol City but only made 6 appearances that season and was sold to Peterborough at the start of the 2019/20 season.
In total he has played 240 games scoring 120 goals, but our only concern is that he scored just 5 goals in 36 games last season for Peterborough, but we can possibly forgive him that as he was very often playing alongside the free scoring Jonson Clarke-Harris, hopefully Russ and the coaching team will get the best out of him. We wish Mo all the best and welcome him as a Don and look forward to seeing him celebrate in front of the Cowshed very soon.
