Gianluca Scamacca continues to thrive away from West Ham United with the Premier League outfit selling a ‘great striker’ with ‘incredible strength’ to Serie A outfit Atalanta.
With Michail Antonio and Danny Ings struggling to even buy a goal at present – the sight of the former firing over the bar from point blank range in last week’s 3-2 defeat at Brentford summing up his ongoing malaise – Gianluca Scamacca’s outstanding start to life back in Italy feels like a ‘salt meet wounds’ sort of situation.
Scamacca joined Atalanta for a cool £27 million in August after just one, injury-hit campaign at West Ham United. And his ‘irrepressible’ form since returning to Serie A has done little to dispel the feeling that David Moyes, like with Sebastien Haller a couple of seasons earlier, gave up far too soon on a striker with more natural goalscoring talent in one foot than Antonio has in his entire body.
Gianluca Scamacca shows West Ham what they’re missing
“Scamacca is a great talent, with great physical, technical and acrobatic skills. (Scamacca is) unpredictable because he can score in all types of ways,” Paolo Nicolato, who coached Scamacca for Italy’s U21s, tells Gazzetta dello Sport.
“He knows how to invent situations from nothing, like great strikers know how to do. He is a true athlete, with incredible strength and great coordination despite his enormous size.
“When he shoots on goal, nine times out of 10, he scores.”
Scamacca’s record is not quite that impressive. But five goals in five Serie A starts is certainly quite the return, the one-time Milan, Inter, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain target scoring twice and setting up another during Atalanta’s recent 3-0 battering of Empoli.
Five goals in five Serie A starts
“(Atalanta coach Gian Piero) Gasperini pays particular attention to the front line. We share this thought. We strongly believed in and wanted Scamacca because we were certain of bringing back to Italy a striker with great potential. And, for this reason, we invested a lot to buy him,” CEO Luca Percassi, the son of club president Antonio, tells Tuttosport.
“He and the other new arrivals will help us. It is a source of great pride, we think we have very interesting forwards.”
The irony will not be lost on West Ham supporters that, only a few months after selling Scamacca, Moyes is likely to be in the market for another number nine in January. And far from us to dish out advice to a coach with such vast experience, we’d recommend giving Vangelis Pavlidis, Adam Hlozek or whoever the Hammers get their mitts on the time and the patience they need to adapt to life in the Premier League.
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