Describe West Ham United captain Jarrod Bowen – into double figures for yet another Premier League season – in just three words.
One suspects that, amongst the majority of Hammers News readers, the three which appear most commonly are ‘fast’, ‘clinical’ and ‘hard-working’.
Jarrod Bowen is a Champions League-level player keeping West Ham United heads above water in the bottom half of the table. Another stellar solo campaign in an underwhelming outfit.
Since the beginning of the 2021/22 Premier League campaign, only nine players have scored more than his 54 goals. His ruthless finishing in the final third, however, only tells part of the story.
Bowen’s goals have made him a fan favourite. But it is his willingness to sacrifice blood, sweat and buckets of lactic acid – leading by example from the front, quite literally – which has the skipper firmly cemented amongst the club’s modern-day ‘legends’.
Speaking during last summer’s European Championships, Declan Rice highlighted the ferocious work-ethic and the selfless, Duracell Bunny-esque running of the man who succeeded him as West Ham’s captain.
“We relied on Bowen. We relied on him so much to get up the pitch,” Rice said. “His work-rate under Moyesy [former boss David Moyes] was just like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
“Obviously now, he is a club legend. There are a lot of wingers who are luxury wingers, who don’t actually do the work back because they are so good going forward. But with him, he has got both sides of the game.”
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Celtic star Daizen Maeda could be West Ham’s next Jarrod Bowen
Simply put, forwards like Jarrod Bowen are hard to find. Forwards who combine a fierce out-of-possession tenacity with the dead-eyed composure to finish off chances when they fall their way.
Difficult to find, yes, but not impossible.
According to Caught Offside, Scottish champions Celtic have placed a £25 million price-tag on Daizen Maeda. As such, with West Ham one of a number of clubs this side of Hadrian’s Wall keen on the tireless Japan international, Maeda could potentially be snapped up for a very similar fee to the one Hull City received for Bowen half-a-decade earlier.
And there is certainly something very Bowen-esque about Daizen Maeda.
As Celtic boss Brendan Rodgers once put it, ‘when you have Daizen Maeda in your team, he puts in the work of two players’. His ‘unbelievable mentality’ was perhaps summed up best when he opened the scoring just 21 seconds into a 3-3 Old Firm derby thriller between Celtic and Rangers last year.
Gers captain James Tavernier made the critical error of letting the ball bounce, under the impression that he could simply roll it back to Jack Butland. Not with Maeda around. Few footballers across the entire planet are capable of almost tackling the ball into the net, but Maeda is a rare breed indeed.
“He’s as good a player as you can get in world football, off the ball,” former Rangers winger Neil McCann said. “What a job he does.”
Maeda solves his biggest weaknesses during prolific season in Scotland
Until recently, the feeling was that one stand-out weakness in Maeda’s game was preventing the four-time Scottish Premiership champion from becoming Celtic’s next mega-money sale, after Virgil van Dijk, Kieran Tierney, Matt O’Riley and co.
But, with a staggering 33 goals across all competitions this season, Maeda has not so much improved his productivity in the final third as tripled it. His previous season-best return in a Celtic shirt saw him net a comparatively measly eleven.
If that was the biggest obstacle preventing Maeda from crossing the border, you can now consider that an obstacle cleared.
“You could see Daizen had a lot of qualities,” recalls Zainadine Junior, Maeda’s former captain at Portuguese outfit Maritimo tells the Daily Record. “He was very fast, with good technique, really strong and capable of scoring goals.
“He liked to run! At training he probably ran too much for the other players in the team. But all of his team-mates loved him because of his work rate.
“He didn’t play up front too often for us, but I’m not surprised he’s there now for Celtic and scoring lots of goals. It was clear he could do it. He probably did too much running [before, without the end product].
“For me, he’s a player who is capable of going to the Premier League. I’m sure English clubs will now be looking at him. And I mean the best clubs in the Premier League because Daizen has become the best player at Celtic now.”
Put yourself in the shoes of a Premier League full-back, preparing to face a West Ham side with Jarrod Bowen charging forward from the left and Daizen Maeda going supersonic on the other flank.
A fearsome thought, indeed.