**West Ham striker Pablo Felipe has received mixed reviews on his from West Ham fans since his arrival in January.**
Pablo Felipe, known as just ‘Pablo’ to most is eligible to play for both Portugal and Brazil, he signed for the Hammers from Portuguese club Gil Vicente at the beginning of January.
In the 102 days since Pablo arrived in East London, the fans clearly respect him because of his hard-work, passion and want to do well for the badge. However, his lack of quality has shown up on a lot of occasions.
We all love him for his passion, but I’m not sure it makes up for his shortage of quality on the ball. He often struggles to keep hold of the ball, quite often when he needs to move with the ball and make a pass he messes it up.
However, when he’s flicking the ball on or playing one touch he can be effective and it has paid off from time to time. We saw on Friday, his beautiful flick in behind the defence to Taty Castellanos to find the back of the net was brilliant.
Pablo’s biggest problem is his lack of goals, in eleven matches he has zero goals and 1 one assist. The thing is, he hasn’t even come close to scoring a goal. He forced Jose Sa into a save on Friday from a tight angle, it was a great strike, but the fact thats probably the closest he’s come to scoring is worrying.
His lack of goals may be partly down to how Nuno is using him, he’s only played as a proper striker once, the Portuguese gaffer likes to use him just off of Taty Castellanos in a front two for some reason. I suppose it’s working we have improved a lot since they’ve arrived. However, I can’t help but think it would work better if they swapped.
I suppose Nuno was proven right on Friday as Pablo assisted Taty against Wolves, but that’s really the only time they’ve linked up in six starts together.
Pablo is far from the biggest problem in the team on most occasions, and he would be a starter still in majority of matches for me, I just think there is room for improvement there and Nuno can bring that out of him.
After getting his first goal contribution with an assist against Wolves, hopefully he can kick on and create a partnership with Taty in the last six matches of the season and keep us in the Premier League.