Martin Keown believes Eddie Nketiah will bounce back from his mistake against FC Zurich, which gifted the Swiss side a penalty yesterday.
Arsenal faced them in their opening group game of the Europa League as they bid to continue their strong start to the season.
The attacker was an important reason they eventually won the game 2-1 after he contributed with a goal and an assist.
However, his mistake to concede the penalty was not a good one, and it shouldn’t have happened.
Considering the impact he made in the game, we would not talk it about very much, and Keown expects him to learn from it.
He said, as quoted by HITC:
“He makes a lot of it, and rightly so – it is a penalty. But he [Nketiah] won’t be doing that again. It’s about learning. It is a really good learning experience. He switched off, he’s ball-watching, a lazy challenge and he gets punished.”
Just Arsenal Opinion
Nketiah is still just 23, and he will make more mistakes. Even seasoned professionals concede cheap penalties, and we should not be harsh on him.
He is doing his job as an attacker, and that is the most important thing.
Hopefully, he would score more goals in the Europa League this season and probably lead us to the final.
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It was an innocent mistake and soft at that. Don’t think anyone will hold that against him and mainly appreciate he was trying to do his bit at the back. At worst it was a striker’s challenge.
That is one of the risks of having forwards defending in the penalty area. They don’t need to control their force when they are attacking but they need to be extra careful to control their brisk movements when defending . He will learn from the experience.
Nketiah might just turn out to be a solid striker for us, he is good with both feet , the assist for marq goal was set up with his left foot , and his goal shows he isn’t bad with the head too. We just might be on to something here. *fingers crossed*
No one seems to be talking about the defenders here…they let the ball come past them … so Nketiah should not have been having to defend that in the first place
And it’s not a howler so why is there such a focus on it!
The opponent came a bit from behind to try and poke the ball away Nketiah space whilst Nketiah primed to clear the ball off. I thought credit should go to the opponent for creating the pen than a mountain out of the molehill Nketiah scenario. Any player could have caused the pen in Nketiah’s invidious position partially blindsided in the tussle o of that ball.