Ten goals in the league, four in Europe and one in the only game played in the league cup.
On the top of that, seven assists delivered in all competitions so far.
I’m pretty sure Adrian Durham is working on finding a way to label Alexis Sanchez as a failure, somehow, or include him into the Flop XI of the first-half of the season.
Arsène Wenger made it three in a row with the signing of the Chilean, who joins Santi Cazorla and Mesut Özil on the list of world class footballers who came to the Arsenal recently.
He’s got all the ingredients that are making Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi ridiculously dominant in world football: skills, pace, power, directness, flair and finishing – Alexis Sanchez is potentially on level with those two giants.
Calm down, people – I said POTENTIALLY.
Can he gain Messi level?
He is still missing the vision and decision-making required to reach the very top level.
Question is: will he ever reach it? I believe he will.
He is already quite close to that but he still plays too much on his own and his passing is often very poor. Also, he appears to pick the most difficult option most of the time and doesn’t really seem to understand how to combine with his team-mates close to the box.
He surely is exhausted after playing every match of the season bar one in the league and one in the Champions League; he still needs time to adapt to his new colleagues, of course, and the team itself didn’t really find its own shape yet.
I’m afraid he will suffer a dip in form at some point, like any newcomer to England, but the good news is that it will force him to play more with his team-mates and rely less on his own abilities.
When he won’t be able to beat his own maker anymore, he will need to ask for some help from his partners.
At that time, Alexis Sanchez will develop the aspect of his game which needs more improvements and possibly become a more complete player.
The very best players work the hardest
What makes me feel very comfortable about the question whether Alexis Sanchez will reach the very top level is the Chilean’s work rate and willingness, I can barely remember a player with the same desire and spirit Alexis has been showing since he joined.
He is rarely happy with his own performance and demands his team-mates to be as much self-critical as he is; that’s something the whole team was missing in my opinion, a true winning mentality.
I saw him making many mistakes so far, I witnessed some of the most horribly misplaced passes I’ve seen in years and I also saw him keeping his eyes on the ball and end up losing it cheaply, in very dangerous zones.
That doesn’t belong to a true world class player.
But I’ve never seen him being complacent neither, nor acting like a whimsical, selfish pop star.
He works hard for the team, trying to bring his best qualities to the team.
Despite the mistakes and errors he makes, he picks himself up and keeps trying.
That definitely belongs to a world beater in the making, for sure.
He can score goals on his own or create them for his team-mates; he can pull defenders out of their positions and create spaces for fellow forwards or dart into those spaces on his own, waiting for a through-ball. He’s quite deadly on set pieces and can beat a defender with a large choice of skills – anywhere on the pitch.
These are things that both Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi do very well, why shouldn’t we hope Alexis Sanchez will reach the same level?
His obvious qualities, combined with his focus, could lead him to the football Olympus.
If Alexis Sanchez goes to the top, the Arsenal goes to the top.
Italian living in Switzerland, Gooner since mid-nineties, when the Gunners defeated my hometown team, in Copenhagen. I started my own blog and podcast (www.clockenditalia.com) after after some experiences with Italian websites and football magazines. Covering Arsenal Women with the occasional rant about the boys.
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