In thinking about what would have happened today with other bodies in the team - Bony or Michu - then the difference, I think, is significant. I use those two because they have been genuine goal scoring threats. Even when not scoring, they were creative or threatening. I don't see a threat in Gomis. If given room he can be dangerous .... the problem is Tranmere does't play in the Prem, and nobody has CBs like Tranmere's.
So the question becomes one of perseverance, namely Monk's. How long is he going to keep beating the rented mule in the hope that it will suddenly become a stallion. When Monk says, "working on offense" (I'm paraphrasing) then I translate this into getting people to work coherently with Gomis. I'm not sure that this is possible, because like I've said we don't play Tranmere and Gomis doesn't have the strength of Bony, the mobility of Bony, the touch of Bony .... etc that is need to work effectively against Prem defenders. There's no doubt that Gomis is trying ... but his trying is starting to collapse into grasps of desperation and that's not a good sign, because he doesn't do the smart skillful little things that might just make the difference. For example, his "volley" today was him really trying, he did well to get in position for that chance, he anticipated the situation, but he rushed it and ended up with nothing, when Bony would have been more relaxed, finessed and produced a shot of better quality.
I hear a lot of exasperation about where are our goals coming from. I opined about this when we sold Bony. I still can't believe we thought that was good business. Now the chicken is coming home to roost. Yes, we have a ton of money (not as much as we should have had), but we don't have somebody on the field that can replace what we lost, not even close. And the worst part is that none of the other players have it in them to help close the gap.
We're going to have a tough final third of the season. Villa have to win 6 of their last 13 matches to get to 40 points. If they start scoring, when we do not, it's going to get ugly and our goal difference is being flushed down the toilet in the process. Goal difference is a great predictor of and very well correlated with final season position. Ours is going negative and fast. This portends nothing good - we will end up in the bottom half of the table at this rate - we just can't tell where. Yet.