Kelechi Iheanacho

It's his job to * train and play. He better be up to speed when we are playing no * excuses

 

He actually played a fair bit in pre season so should be ready to play from the get go.

 

Your missing the point.

This is additional training hes doing off his own back, nobody has asked him to do it or expecting him to do it. Majority of players not playing international football will be on time off playing golf or whatever else.
He's decided to travel to Manchester and by the looks of it he's training on a local pitch bcoz he's obviously wanting to do all he can to come up here and make good impression from the start.

We've seen too many of these ex premier League players come up here and treat this as a jolly and not give a * so at the very least the guy is making more effort than others have previously.

 

I'm not missing the point I just think it's being overdone. A (supposedly) professional athlete doing some extra training in order to regain fitness is hardly anything out of the ordinary. If he really is desperate to do well here then it's most likely down to the fact he knows his career is now in the last chance saloon.

 

Probably a smart move to film it..

 

Aye I don't think we should be going over the top congratulating him for keeping himself fit.

It is part of his job to be fair.
Yes of course he is paid to go to training and match days, so this stuff we are seeing is "extra", but it's still his job to ensure he is fit for match day. And it's not like professional footballer is the same as every other 9-5 job where you only "work" when you clock in.

What is good to see though, is the difference in his fitness/size and that he IS working on it all.
Albeit it's his job, it's refreshing to see he's actively working towards fixing his known downfalls and the fact he's filming it for his socials, suggests he cares about what people's opinion are at this stage. He's trying to get the message out there that he's gearing up to be ready.




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I think he could come to surprise a few, here's hoping.

 

Please shut up. Every time I come in this thread it’s you moaning. Direct it elsewhere or I’ll start calling you Peter.

 

* saying we are daft for praising someone for doing extra training.

You away in to your work and do some extra shifts then, make sure you pay someone to do it too.

Fannies. Not like anyone is going overboard, he’s in better shape than he was for Middlesbrough or even Pre-season and that says something.

 

The most encouraging thing to me about the videos is he looks in far better shape than he did in that Middlesbrough video, where he looked like he had excess body fat to shift. That largely looks gone from those training videos.

Also just looking at Fotmob and it is only really last season that he had an absolute stinker of a year and even then his creativity stats per 90 weren’t terrible at Middlesbrough.

One thing I would say is he doesn’t seem like your out and out striker and his strong points seem to be his creative play, he’s a good dribbler both in terms of volume and success, good xA, good level of chance creation and good passing accuracy and that is consistent through 18/19 all the way to 23/24 if anything improving over time.

Off the ball he doesn’t seem to offer much but has in the past under Rodgers in particular had decent numbers for possession wins in the final third.

At Middlesbrough second half of last season, we have all seen what sort of shape he had fallen into and even then his creative numbers still held up pretty well and his tackles won was fairly high.

So what do I take from that? I think if he has got himself fit he could really help us but maybe not in the way people are thinking off. So he has never been a free scoring forward at any point in his career and that may well not change but he has been creative at a high level his whole career.

One of our major problems just now is creating chances, we played our three biggest games of the season so far and literally created about 4 or 5 chances across those three games (Kairat home and away and Rangers away).

How do we use him in our team? Well we currently have an issue that we have signed a number of players that would rather be Left wing Balikwisha and Tournekti, attacking midfield in Nygren and Balikwisha or if Maeda was to play wide he has come from the left too. Even Yang in recent times has liked livelier off the left. Iheanacho was at his most effective in a two striker system previously but I believe if we wanted to stick to the 4-3-3 or move to a 4-2-3-1 could he play as the inverted right winger? Play Maeda down the middle and one of the new wingers off the left probably Tournekti.

The alternative is he plays as the centre forward but we expect him to come deep and we really push Nygren from centre midfield to to get beyond the striker and be one of our main sources of goals this season with Maeda and Tournekti playing at the wingers, Maeda mainly coming inside to be the centre forward.

Fingers crossed Iheanacho isn’t too far away from a good level of fitness as I think if we get that then he could be a very useful option, all be it probably not the goalscoring out and out striker we still lack.

 

Said it another thread but if he's actually fit and on it his strength and close control will really add to our build up play. One up top in this Rodgers system can be a lonely place unless you have certain capabilities. Idah didn't have the game intelligence or touch to drop deep and Kyogo had his moments but was too lightweight for it.

 

Yeah, Iheanacho also had a real bias for taking up the just of the front to the right hand side space on the pitch; a bit like Edouard used to like picking up in that sort of space but on the left which isn’t that surprising given Iheanacho is a left footer and Edouard a right but I think there is some similarities between the two players.

I could see him being effective either as you say as a striker coming off the front or even off the right wing coming inside.

 

Sounds like he's making an effort and taking things seriously which is a good start. Not expecting him to set any scoring records but hopefully the new wingers can help give us a bit of freshness in the system and they can all contribute creatively together.

 

I think it's mental we've got pro- and anti-Iheanacho camps before he's even kicked a ball for us. Don't get me wrong, I'm in one of them - I fully expect him to be * - but it's just mental how the support divides in opposite directions over some players from the moment they sign.

 

Well that's soul destroying

 

I'm pretty sure Sevilla and Hoffenheim would have bad things to say about Dolberg. Just like Villa fans thought Sinclair was mince.

Let's just see what he does here.

 

1 goals in 700 minutes means he must have played Very, Very few minutes per game for Boro considering he had about 47 games for them lol.

The whole team was hopeless that season so can't really use those stats to much against him even though you could at the same time i guess. And after that he went to Sevilla and really did not play that much at all. So just before those two clubs where he had extremely limited play time, he had a really good goalscoring record as a backup to Jamie Vardy.

His avg game time over 47 games where 13 minutes/game. Not easy to do well with that in a * team Even less at Sevilla. This actually makes me MUCH more positive as the last time he actually played regular football was at Leicester.