Journalist Sam Inkersole has claimed that West Ham United playmaker Pablo Fornals had a ‘good game’ against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Wednesday night.
The 23-year-old has endured a rough start to life in English football, but has started the past two games for the Hammers and looked marginally better.
That’s the view of Inkersole, anyway: “Pablo Fornals had a good game against Wolves on Wednesday,” he wrote on the Football London website. “He faded a bit in the second half like most of his teammates thanks to Pellegrini’s questionable tactical changes and substitutions, but it shouldn’t take anything away from Fornals.
“That said, his pass for Robert Snodgrass was exquisite in the second half and the Scotsman should have scored to make it 1-1. Fornals made four extremely intelligent runs in the first half to drag Matt Doherty away from where he wanted to be, twice the defender appealed in vain for offside against Fornals.
“We always knew there was a good player in there with Fornals but he hadn’t shown it. During the past two games he has begun to finally get to grips with the Premier League and shown us exactly what he can do.”
OPINION
Obviously it’s not the biggest compliment in the world to say that Fornals has looked better in the past two games than he has in all the others ones he’s played so far this season, but it’s still encouraging to see him make strides against Chelsea and now up against Wolves. He almost scored with a terrific curling effort at one point, while he played that aforementioned pass to Snodgrass, from which the Scot really should have found the back of the net. The statistics from Wednesday’s game suggest that the Spaniard is getting better. As per WhoScored.com, he produced one shot – on target – and one key pass. Meanwhile, he made three crosses and two long balls forward. In the win over the Blues in the previous game, he claimed a season-best WhoScored rating of 7.06. Again, that’s not saying too much, but any progress is a good thing for West Ham fans. They’ve been waiting for the summer signing to show what he can do, and he’s started to do so in the past two fixtures.
