The lad is a breath of fresh air. Those who have been watching him since his Arsenal youth days feels justified in hyping him up and those who are knew to his talents are excited to see what unfolds.
You then turn to Theo Walcott. The 27-year-old has been at Arsenal a decade and has made 339 appearances for the club, scoring 85 goals and assisting 70. When he’s in a run of good form, for example, at the beginning of this season when Olivier Giroud wasn’t finding the net, he can be a weapon (lol). His speed is unrivalled and if he had more a natural ability, he would be deadly. But he doesn’t. Just running quickly at defenders with the ball is useless if you have no end product.
Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has only been at the club since 2011 but he’s, arguably, been even more frustrating than Theo this season. His habit of just running into traffic and failing to lay off the ball to just about anyone around him, as well as his bizarre attempts on goal, has been painful to watch. What’s more alarming is that if you look at his stats, for a forward with such ‘potential’, they’re actually pretty poor. He’s scored just 14 goals in 149 appearances and delivered 21 assists. This isn’t good enough.
When he scored against Chelsea in the Community Shield, many of us thought that this season it was finally it. He was going to finally reach his potential and score a tonne of goals. This was the moment we’d been waiting for. But it never happened.