Euro 2016: 5 youngsters who can impress
A feast of summer football will be more than enough to satisfy the fans’ appetites for the next few weeks as the European Championships gets ready to take over our lives until regular club action returns in earnest.
International football doesn't always get the plaudits it deserves nowadays but there are those who believe that it remains the most prestigious sphere in this day and age and with Euro 2016 hosting some of the best players, it is sure to tee up plenty of exciting moments, matches and goals to savour along the way.
There are set to be some notable absentees at L’Hexagone but that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of unfamiliar faces popping up to take their place and do the business. More intriguingly, though, we can all expect a barrage of talented starlets to look to capture the headlines.
So, who should we all be keeping tabs on throughout?
#1 Anthony Martial
There was very little for Manchester United fans to get excited about over the course of the 2015/16 Premier League season as Louis Van Gaal’s tenure lurched from one mediocre performance to the next, but a couple of promising takeaways from it all was the individual talents of a select few individuals – one of whom was Anthony Martial.
The France international contributed directly to 15 goals in the league with 11 strikes and four assists to his name and while that didn’t set England alight, it certainly underlined that he can score even when he’s playing in a side that aren’t complementing his strengths; imagine what he’ll do next season when he’s finally given the opportunity to let loose a little more under new boss Jose Mourinho.
As for the immediacy of this summer, he is definitely one to watch.
Normally played on the left of an attacking trio, or sometimes out very wide as a winger, the 20-year-old has proven himself to be rather adept at setting up his team-mates so Romania, Albania and Switzerland will all have to work overtime to try and stop the flow of distribution from that flank into the rest of the attackers if they want to give themselves a good chance of survival in the group stage.
He recently won the Premier League Twitter Goal Cup goal of the season, as voted for by fans, for his wonder strike against Stoke City so we could well see him do something similar in his homeland once the action tips off on June 10.