He can improve on his decision making of course but he still has very encouraging numbers, his per 90 xG is 0.32, which is a 1 in 3 attacker. I'd expect him to just generally improve as a young player in his 2nd season in the league, so he can both improve on cutting out the dumb shots and still maintaining his good xG. It's promising now, is what I'm saying. I'd rather have an attacker like him that you just fine tune when to pass and improve their decision making as they actually have the potential to be top goal scorers, rather than have somebody who just doesn't get in goalscoring chances.
I think you're making the wrong conclusion here, he's having high xG because of the position he plays in and because he takes many shots. There is very little brilliance that puts him in those high scoring positions. Put Bruno there and he would easily double those chances created/goals. Actually, put
anyone there and expect to have5 goal contributions over the course of the season. It's just
anyone can't do the midfield/defensive work that Antony does.
Nani was a far better player.
I like Antony but my word he has to be scoring more. Finds himself in great positions then doesn't remotely look like finishing the chance off or making the right pass. Very frustrating.
This. His output for a first season isn't that bad... unless you look at the number of chances he missess and how many wrong choices/execution leads to nothing.
He was decent against west ham and was unlucky to not score. He was unlucky to be the one taken off. I'm talking in isolation here, in no way am I suggesting he's great, I think we wasted 100 million on him when we should have priotised signing a striker even with ronaldo as we saw his drop off at the end of last season and eth should have foreseen he was not long term solution.
Antony signing should illustrate and serve as a lesson that we should not be blindly backing the manager to sign his own players. Get in a sporting director so we don't allow this situation to unfold ever again where the manager becomes obssessive over a medicore signing
I am not sure if any manager would do that, but if we had no RW we should've gone for a stop-gap signing there and assess after a season.
Obviously we didn't buy a finished article, but it's not like we bought some super prospect that everyone in Europe wanted. He was actually valued at 25-35m which I think is about right for a squad player midfielder/winger hybrid. ETH tried to be smart here and it's totally on him, right now after one season I'm very very pessimistic about this guy becoming anything more than he is now.