Are we agreed that Fashion Sakala has the starting jersey for the right-hand side of our attack, for now, at least?
For a player who is normally about not playing as well as his numbers would suggest, the Zambian international’s display was, arguably, better than the one in which he scored a hat-trick against Motherwell last season. In short, he was robbed of the man of the match award.
We all know that Sakala is chaos personified, sometimes even he doesn’t really look like he knows what he is doing, however, having seen more minutes recently, his touch looks better as does his decision-making.
For 90-minutes he tormented whoever was tasked with marking him on the left of Aberdeen’s defence. When he had the space to knock the ball past and attack the by-line, he did but, he varied this with cutting inside and linking with the midfield and central attackers. It was a more controlled display than we normally get from him.
On another day he gets on the scoresheet himself and a couple of assists but it just wasn’t to be, this by no means should detract from just how electrifying he was though and, if we can see this Sakala more often, then we might finally have found the answer to a problem that has needed solving for several seasons now.
Giovanni van Bronckhorst needs to trust him now, stop rotating the role and let Sakala add a bit of consistency to his game. As we saw against Aberdeen, with him and Ryan Kent both on it, not many teams will be able to stop them causing the same damage that they caused to Jim Goodwin’s side.