Arsenal’s young striker Eddie Nketiah is scoring goals for fun for the England U21s with another 2 against Albania last night makes it an incredible 16 goals in just 12 starts for the Young Lions, breaking Alan Shearer’s long held record easily.
But he is very rarely a starter for Arsenal, with 7 of his 8 appearances in the League this season coming from the bench, he has only managed one goal so far. In the Europa League he has scored once in 3 starts, and once from 2 starts in the League Cup.
But the question remains whether he can score regularly against Premier League sides, but surely he needs to get a regular run as a starter in side so we can find out for ourselves.
He is obviously oozing with confidence with the England team, and he has a surprising fan in Liverpool’s ex-hitman Michael Owen bigging him up last night. After watching Eddie bounce back from missing a penalty then go on to score 2 goals, Owen told BTSport: “He’s very good,”
“He’s got a real smell for it, hasn’t he? He knows where the ball’s going to drop. I like his movement. I like his hunger to score goals.
“Some players are confidence players. If you miss a penalty and you’re a confidence player, you go missing all game. If you’ve just got pure self-belief, it just shrugs off you and you’re just onto the next one.
“With that type of attitude, with the way he plays, he’s just going to be a goal machine all his career. The key for him is obviously trying to get consistently into that Arsenal team, and then all his horizons are open.”
Now I know we don’t always like Michael Owen, but when you consider that our star-studded current front line have not scored a goal from open play for the last 4 games, perhaps Arteta should be aware that Nketiah is in a confident mood and should now get a regular run as an actual starter, rather than a supersub. Surely he’s got to be a better Number 9 than Willian!