Why Adama Traore isn't yet the star Middlesbrough fans claim he is
Adama Traore is a player with fantastic potential, let’s not get that twisted. Traore is still only 22-years-old, and boasts frightening pace and strength that we very rarely see on a football pitch.
You do not come through the famous academy at Barcelona if you do not have something about you, so the coaches at the Spanish giant must have seen talent in him.
Boro Fan TV regular, @jrs_97, uploaded a video to Twitter which claimed Adama is ‘out of this world’.
A statement I find quite simply over the top and exaggerated. Middlesbrough have played 34 times in the league and you could count the games Traore has seriously impacted on one hand.
This season, Boro’s key threat in attack has scored three times and assisted four. Are those really the stats of a player who is out of this world?
Just for comparison, Cardiff City’s centre-half, Sean Morrison has scored four goals. Let that sink in.
Traore has scored a huge three goals in the first five years of his professional career, all have come whilst at Boro. He scored zero times at both Barcelona and Aston Villa.
I went to the Middlesbrough home game against Reading just a few weeks ago and I was really impressed with him. He looked like Boro’s only threat going forward, and he was too much for the Reading defence to handle.
When Adama performs like he did against Reading, scoring two goals and terrorising the opposition, he looks like a player who could hold his own in the Premier League. However, those performances are few and far between, and the hype around him at this stage is unjustified.
If he really was this star that Boro fans make him out to be then he wouldn’t be at Middlesbrough, let’s be honest. A Premier League club or team in Europe would have expressed serious interest in the January transfer window.
Believe it or not, I am a fan of Adama Traore and I believe that he has the potential to play in a league such as the Premier League.
However, he needs to add consistency to his game, turning up a handful times a season isn’t good enough.
He needs to be hitting double figures for goals scored and he should be impacting matches on a regular basis. Once he does that is the moment he can be considered a top player.
Credit to The Gazette Live for the imagery used in this article.