Aston Villa legend, Gabriel Agbonlahor has come out to say that Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang dropped down a gear after he signed a new contract. He recently revealed that Aubameyang was very poor in front of goal after penning the new deal.
According to him, he doesn’t blame Arteta for dropping him from time to time last year because you can’t just keep someone on the pitch if he isn’t performing.
He added that if Auba was still negotiating a contract, he would have definitely played better vs Brighton.
His words, “You can’t just keep someone on the pitch if they aren’t performing.”
“It’s different with Cristiano [Ronaldo] because he is one of the greatest ever players.”
“But Aubameyang was poor. He wasn’t holding the ball up. It didn’t look like he had that pace to get in behind that Brighton defence and it was the right call to bring him off.”
“When you are looking for a new contract, there is no lie; your performances are going to go up. Once the contract is signed, naturally you are going to take it down a gear; at least, that’s what you can see in Aubameyang’s performances since he has signed that contract.”
“Where’s the hunger [on Saturday] say if he was still negotiating his contract for £300k-a-week? Let’s be honest, if he was still negotiating a contract, he would have got a better performance 1000% against Brighton.”
“It would be easy to get carried away with that result last week [the win over Tottenham] because they were fantastic but this was a very well-drilled Brighton side in difficult conditions and a very young Arsenal side.”
“I thought Aubameyang today [Saturday], unfortunately, was poor, I thought Partey was poor. I thought Martin [Odegaard] didn’t play very well. We know what Brighton are going to do, we need to keep the ball and get the counter-attack going. We could not do that today.”
“Everything was bouncing off Aubameyang. When he got into opportunities he couldn’t quite get it out of his feet. It just wasn’t happening for him. It was an off day; we saw how sharp he was last week.”
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