The name Noa Lang should be more than familiar to you at this point, particularly if you’re an Arsenal fan.
The Club Brugge youngster is highly rated and has had eyes on him in the Premier League for a while, with Leeds trying very hard to get him over the last 18 months and failing.
Now it is Arsenal who are at the front of the queue, with numerous reports over the last few months linking them with a move.
The latest is that they are showing ‘concrete’ interest in the youngster, so much so that it is causing a ‘headache’ for the Belgian club ahead of the January transfer window.
If they do want him, it’s been made clear they’ll have to put the right amount of money on the table, although his entourage have made it clear they want out.
Whether anything comes of it remains to be seen, and in the meantime, Lang continues to impress for Brugge and establish himself on the international stage with the Netherlands.
While he’s busy earning plenty of fans, there are those who really aren’t all that keen, and Wim Kieft is one of them.
“Why does that boy always have his sleeves over his hands? Come on, man! That doesn’t look good, does it?” Voetbal Primeur report him saying.
“From the first moment I saw him play football, he annoyed me enormously. Enfant terrible, that’s what he wants to project.
“I find it terrible to see. Stop it, man. And there is nobody in the national team that says to him: Would you please not do that?”
It’s an opinion shared by his fellow analyst Johan Derksen, who also isn’t impressed by the youngster’s attitude either.
“He also had this with FC Twente and Ajax. His body language is incredibly irritating,” Twente Fans report him saying.
“You also have footballers who pull their stockings up so far that it looks like they need suspenders. As a coach, I’d say: get your kit in order. Only if you shoot all the balls in, then everything is allowed.”
Now, we don’t know whether any of this matters to Arsenal. We’re inclined to say it doesn’t, with it more ‘old man shouting at kids’ than anything more serious.
Having said that, the club don’t have a good history with players whose body language isn’t up to scratch, as proven by the long and tiresome arguments about Mesut Ozil during his time at the club.
That whole situation became something of a circus around the German, and perhaps they’d be wise to avoid signing another player with body language problems.
It’s certainly something to consider, although we’d advise they do their own research rather than listen to the likes of Kieft, who is working hard to establish himself as the miserable old man of football analysis in the Netherlands.
