It’s taken Mohamed Elneny a few months to settle into the Arsenal team since his arrival in January, but he certainly came of age in last night’s defeat in Barcelona. Even when he made his debut for the club in the FA Cup against Burnley, we all saw that the Egyptian was keen to take long shots from outside of the box and he came close in most of his games until last night.
His perseverance finally paid off when he scored a wonderful equalizer in the Nou Camp to give the Gunners a chance to get back into the game, but as usual our mis-firing (or unlucky?) strikers failed to build on Mohamed Elneny’s first ever goal for Arsenal, and we were duly undone by Barca’s MSN threesome.
Elneny was interviewed after the game, and it shows that he is still learning the English football cliches, but at least he is positive about the rest of the season. “We did what we could today. Sure, we lost, but we tried our best. We were playing against a big team.” he said.
“We’re still up for the league. We need to focus. We still have nine games to go and God willing we can do it.
“We know it’s a big stadium and a great stadium too but I’m happy with my performance today, but not that happy about the result. I knew it’d be hard, but there is no ‘hard’ in football.”
Okay he may not be able to give our seasoned performers any lessons in how to give an interview, but he is certainly showing the team how to take more speculative long range shots, especially when they are not kicked straight at the opposing keeper!
In the first half of this season (at Basle), Mohamed Elneny scored 5 goals. Now he has broken his duck in the Premier League it would be great if he could match that number and inspire the rest of the Arsenal team to make more of their chances….