Craig Burley is always one of Chelsea’s biggest critics, and he was of course one of top names who loved laying into Nicolas Jackson when he was struggling last year.
So it’s a sign of how things have changed in the 12 months since that Burley is now on ESPN singing the striker’s praises. The former Chelsea player and current pundit went into some detail about the aspects of Jackson’s game he’s enjoying most:
“His link-up play, I’m thinking West Ham away, Wolves away, games where he’s dropped in, they’ve played the ball into his feet quickly. He’s either laid it off or he spun it around the corner and Chelsea on the break” Burley said in a long passage speaking about the Blues’ 2-1 win over Leicester yesterday and other games in the last couple of months.
“I didn’t think he had that in his game. I didn’t think he had that facet in his locker where he could link-up the play as well as running behind. So listen, I don’t want to go over the top. It’s very early in the season, but you have to give credit when players have stepped up to the plate and improved, and he’s one of them.”
Jackson is taking his game to unexpected new heights and bringing teammates with him
It’s been great to hear pundits walking back their comments on Jackson, who has gone up levels this season. 7 goals and 3 assists in 12 games is a superb return, but as Burley said, it’s about more than that.
He works his socks off and makes his teammates better. He’s been a great signing, and Burley’s previous opinion that we’d had some “utterly stupid” squad building surely also needs to be revised at some point. There have been some big misses, but there are hits in there too, none bigger than Jackson.
The thing is…. Jackson has been doing all of the things he now (finally) commends Jackson for all along, lol! The only thing he wasn’t doing with quite enough consistency was converting his chances. But he was really quite consistent all of last season at working off the ball (whether it was pressing or making runs in the channels), linking up play, and creating chances. With a wonderful combination of pace and power, the only thing that was clearly missing was that bit of class/confidence with the final touch.
So, for Burley to be only coming around to seeing the light now means he’s just not a particularly astute evaluator of talent. I give him a modest amount of credit for being big enough to admit he was wrong, but if he wasn’t such a blowhard and had actually studied Jackson’s game (particularly some of the data) he’d have recognized that Jackson was a diamond in the rough all along.
Luckily nobody cared about Craig’s negative opinions anyway.