Oxlade-Chamberlain admits lack of confidence affects him

The Arsenal midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain looked very listless towards the end of last year but Arsene Wenger kept giving him more opportunities to get himself out of it. It didn’t seem to work and A few weeks ago Le Prof publicly said that maybe the Ox “doesn’t completely believe in himself as to how good he can be.”

Now Alex himself has stated that there is some truth in that. ‘Going back to those comments, do I believe in myself? Yeah, of course I do,’ he said. ‘But there’s a lot of external factors in there. How much you play, how you play, all constantly challenging you to doubt yourself.

‘Obviously there are times in your career when people doubt you, you have good form, bad form, get criticised, get bigged up. You go through spells of trying to find out how much to listen to, what to not pay too much attention to.

‘There will be times – and I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times – when I lost a little bit of confidence. But the people around me, close to me, were the ones to tell me that I’d been playing slightly differently, not as confidently as I had been.

‘Then I’d look at my game a bit closer, how I used to play, how I played more positively and there had been times when I looked for more simple options.

“That’s part of developing and learning as a young player, you’re going to have good times and bad times, you have to weather those storms and come out on top.’

But the question now is; When is he actually going to start fulfilling his potential? So many youngsters have maybe been overhyped at too young an age and then struggle to live up to the enormous expectations. Walcott, Chambers, the Ox, Gnabry, Akpom, the list goes on…..

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1 Comment

  1. I think we need to keep giving him a chance this year in cup games and part of the rotation but if doesn’t improve we need to send him out on loan to gain more experience. Unless we sell Campbell in which case we have to keep him and hope he improves over the off season like Theo did. Imho if he works on his technique he could be terrifying for defenses around the league.

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