View: Why Tony Pulis was spot on about Serge Gnabry as tiresome WBA-bashing starts up again
Tony Pulis divided opinion among West Brom fans during his spell in charge at The Hawthorns but if the Welshman got one thing right in that time, it’s that Serge Gnabry was not good enough for the club during his loan spell in 2015/16.
Ever since that loan deal was cut short and Gnabry was sent back to Arsenal, the attacker has gone on to become a world-class player for Bayern Munich and Germany with the tiresome Baggie-bashing starting up again over the last few days due to the 25-year-old’s stunning displays in the Champions League.
https://twitter.com/paddypower/status/1296165256604024833
We see it every single time Gnabry scores and, quite honestly, we’re fed up of it.
Gnabry played just three times in all competitions during his loan spell at West Brom in 2015 and guess what? He did absolutely nothing worthy of discussion in those appearances.
It led to Pulis infamously saying, as quoted by ESPN in October 2015: “Serge has come here to play games but he just hasn’t been for me, at the moment, at that level to play the games.
“He’s come from academy football and not played much league football – does academy football really prepare players for league football? And we’re talking about Premier League football here.
“As a manager, you pick a team that’s going to win a game of football. You pick your best team – you don’t leave people out because you don’t like them, because of this, that and the other.”
Gnabry had started two EFL Cup games – and failed to finish either of them – and came off the bench once in the Premier League – in a defeat to Chelsea – before Pulis said that. Pulis had also seen the German attacker in training for a few months so his view of the Stuttgart-born player had a lot of base to it.
While Gnabry was kind of thrown into the deep end in the game against Chelsea, stats by WyScout show that he completed just four passes in 18 minutes of game time, lose the ball four times and completed just one of the four dribbles he attempted.
But it wasn’t really Gnabry’s performances that were the issue, it was his fitness.
Pulis pointed that out more recently by saying: “We had him at West Brom, we took him on loan and we could never get him fit.
“He even got taken off in an Under-21 game and he went back to Arsenal and they sold him on.”
Gnabry started three Under-21 games for the Baggies and failed to finish any of them.
Every time he took to the pitch he looked disinterested, as though he didn’t want to be there and as though he was too good to play for the West Midlands club.
Pulis was spot on to not play him and his quotes, to this day, are totally correct and the mocking of them is just plain stupid.
Who would have thought that a player, in a period of five years, would improve?
We’ve seen one tweet on Twitter which sums it up perfectly:
In other West Brom news, this £55,000-a-week Baggies ace has been tipped to head to China this summer.
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