Oxlade-Chamberlain – Don’t worry! I’ll perform for England

The Arsenal youngster Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain may have been a shock inclusion for England after just having made just six League starts for the Gunners this season, but he still seems quite relaxed about it all and has confirmed (for me at least) that he can handle all the pressure that may be thrown at him.

“The way I see it is that if you play football you want to play for clubs like Arsenal then you want to play for a country like England as well,” he said on Arsenal.com.

“You would be silly to want to do these things and not expect people to have high standards. People will support you but they will also expect you to deliver and I think that is all part of it. You have to have some pressure but at the same time you can’t get worked up about it – football is football.

“It’s like a singer, when they go up on stage the crowd expects a good performance. It’s the same with football, when we go onto the pitch people expect us to deliver. We all just have to try and make sure we do our best to do so. We can only do that by working hard and expressing ourselves.”

His level-headedness for his age is quite astounding when you consider how far he has come in the last year. He just seems to naturally understand that you need to keep on working hard to improve no matter how good you are already. Perhaps Arsenal should sign his father as a mentor to other youngsters in the team, because he has done a fantastic job with Alex!