Mikel Arteta believes Viktor Gyokeres is an incredible striker, and his adaptation period has just been a case of player and club learning to understand each other.
Despite scoring 15 goals and providing a couple of assists so far this season, Arsenal summer signing Viktor Gyokeres has come in for plenty of criticism along the way.
There’s certainly been a bit less of that this week, following the 27-year-old’s brace in the north London derby. But today’s supporters are generally only one game away from another meltdown.
You’d hope the player’s own manager would give a more balanced assessment of Gyokeres’ time at Arsenal so far, and Mikel Arteta was asked about the striker in his press conference ahead of the Gunners’ match against Chelsea on Sunday.
In response, the manager insisted Gyokeres is an incredible striker, and he just needed to develop an understanding with his teammates.
“I think one thing leads to another,” Arteta said. “When you score the first one, or the performance is good, you have more time with your teammates, you understand the games, the opponents, the league better, everything helps.
“We know his qualities, he’s undoubtedly an incredible striker. We need to feed into his quality, we need to understand him better, he needs to understand the team and the league better, and I think we are on the right trajectory.
“I want the stats to show that with him we are the better team and we have achieved what we want. He can be a huge contributor to our success, scoring goals and doing many of the things that he does really well throughout the games.”
Perhaps one thing counting against Gyokeres so far is that his goals and assists have often come in clusters.
The striker has scored braces against Atletico Madrid, Leeds United, Sunderland, and Tottenham Hotspur, and he got both a goal and an assist in matches against Kairat Almaty and Chelsea.
That means 12 of his 17 direct goal contributions were in just six of his 36 games, not leaving many for the other 30. His performances are inevitably going to feel less consistent than if he’d scored and assisted the same total across 17 different matches.
But perhaps it’s also a sign that when the team and Gyokeres do get it right, he can be a big threat. If he can keeping killing games with two or more goals rather than stopping at one, that will help a lot in the business end of the season.