Simy faced a losing battle immediately lowly Crotone secured automatic promotion to Serie A post-lockdown last year, with many questioning whether the towering striker could thrive in the big time with the Pythagoreans.
After rather indifferent campaigns in 2016/17 and the following season, the jury was out on the 28-year-old.
If anyone had intimated last year that the forward — who netted only three and seven times in both top flight seasons — was going to be a handful of goals behind Cristiano Ronaldo (25) and Romelu Lukaku (21) and ahead of Ciro Immobile (18) and Zlatan Ibrahimovic (15) in the scoring charts with five games remaining, there may have been a few cackles.