Why Jacob Murphy Would Become Newcastle’s Signing Of The Season
Jacob Murphy has flown to Ireland to hook up with the Newcastle United squad ahead of his £12million move from Norwich City.
The flying winger has his dream move at last, as not only are Newcastle a massive club and are now back in the Premier League, but Murphy also supported them as a boy despite having been born in North London. Murphy’s mother was apparently born on Tyneside herself, which would explain the connection. And now, the England under-21 international gets to don the black and white shirt at the top level.
Why could he be the club’s best signing of the summer though? For starters, they haven’t made many! But all joking aside, this is a flying machine who has tapped into barely a fraction of his talent so far in his career and there is so much more to come from him.
I myself have a history in horse racing and it’s easy in that sport to see an animal which has not filled out it’s frame and has tons of room for improvement. With that experience, sometimes you spot that same thing in footballers and he is the human equivalent of an 80-rated horse which you know will be 100+ over the next year or so.
Murphy is already learning to add goals to his immense pace and trickery. While on loan at Coventry in League One alongside Newcastle’s Adam Armstrong, he netted 10 goals in 42 games. Last year at Championship level, Murphy scored another 10 in 40 games and at that rate of improvement, he looks set to be able to do similar things at the top.
If he does achieve that feat, imagine what he’ll be worth in the current transfer market in 2018? It doesn’t bear thinking about. So this is undoubtedly a great coup for the club.
To back up his improving ability, consider that he is now a regular member of an impressive England under-21 team having been capped 6 times, scoring once. He played in the recent Euro tournament too, losing only to Germany on penalties (he may as well get used to that now!).
Although he is primarily labelled as a right-winger, Murphy is comfortable on both sides, given his pace and awareness. So he’d go to competition with Matt Ritchie, Christian Atsu and Rolando Aarons in the Newcastle squad. The fact that Yoan Gouffran has left this week is no coincidence and shows another bit of improvement to the squad.
Florian Lejeune is preferable to Grant Hanley and so Rafa Benitez can be said to be chipping away at the improvement needed in order to compete. Although it has been slow going up to now, more incomings are expected at Benton very soon.