I think he’d probably have been okay/good at championship level. on a tangential observation do you reckon he was our worst well liked player? He seemed generally popular despite being mostly useless for us or is that revisionist memory based on swapping him for Defoe?
He was prolific in the Eredivisie and players who do well there have decent success rates in places like England, Spain and Italy, so there was no reason to believe he wouldn't be able to do okay for us.
As for being liked, you could see he had some good qualities like holding off defenders and explosive movement, it's just that he didn't have that extra half second the defenders would give you in Holland, once he figured out he had less time he started to panic in the box which reduced the accuracy of his shooting and touch, the longer he went without a goal seemed to affect him more than most. I believe if he played for a more attacking team, even a lower end Premiership team, he probably would have scored a few more than he did with us.