Newcastle United head coach Steve Bruce has confirmed that midfielder Jonjo Shelvey has been stripped of penalty taking duties.
The England international missed a costly spot-kick in his team’s penalty shootout loss to Leicester City in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday night.
And Bruce has now said that he’ll have to look elsewhere for a new penalty taker: “He’s a very good player,” he said, as per the Shields Gazette.
“He’ll be disappointed he missed that penalty. He missed one against Hull as well. We’ll have to find ourselves a new penalty taker.”
OPINION
You don’t quite know from these quotes whether Bruce was saying this with a straight face or not, but it certainly sounds as if he has stripped Shelvey and is looking for somebody else to step up and take on the mantle of regular penalty taker. Of course, there’s Matt Ritchie who is pretty good from the spot, but he’s now going to be out injured for a couple of months – another unfortunate consequence of Wednesday’s game. You’d think that the two players you’d want to have taking penalties would be club record signing Joelinton or big money winger Miguel Almiron. As per Transfermarkt, the former has got a record of two from three from the spot in his career. The Paraguayan, on the other hand, as per the same website, has scored five and missed just one. That’s a pretty decent record, and considering the fact that he still hasn’t scored for the club, it doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world to put the diminutive South American on spot-kick duty moving forward.
