He's an incredibly frustrating player to watch as a fan of whatever side he's in because for every glimpse of him looking like he might be a really good footballer one day there's about 10 where his final ball is a fucking disgrace, he even nearly ballsed up our goal last night. But he's still only 21 and there aren't really all that many players who are fully developed at that age. Ronaldo was pretty gash at getting the ball into the box for United his first few years too. I'm certainly not saying he'll become as good as that but a better comparison might be Aaron Lennon who is also English, about the same age, has pace to scare defenders and who had similar final ball issues for a long time before relatively recently but Lennon didn't have a big price tag or a trip to the World Cup to live up to.
But though personally I wouldn't pick him in the Arsenal 11 if we had everyone fit to say that he's never made an impact on a game is unfair to him. He's scored the opening goal in a Carling Cup final, he went on that run to set up our goal at Anfield in the CL a couple of years ago, he's scored a hat trick away for England in a World Cup qualifier away against their main group rivals. He even scored last week and okay at the weekend it was only against Wolves but he had a pretty good game on Saturday and while there was still that element of his game where he shanked a few crosses there were a number of times when Arsenal's failure to score was more to do with his team mates not putting away the chances that he created for them than any failure on his part. He does also appear to be made out of Lego what with the way that his arm pops out of it's socket whenever he gets knocked over so maybe if he got 6 months injury free he'd start to deliver the goods.
Most of the time when I see him play though his time in posession makes me exclaim, "oh for fucks sake" at the end of it.
