Duncan Barkes

There's one or two comments suggesting that perhaps his final touch, his final ball or his final shot

could be a bit better but that's not the main part of his game the main part of his game is being uh the engine being being the powerhouse and you know one of the things that i think is characterizing what we're hearing about the players that are coming to pompey or might be coming to pompey is that they have an explosiveness about them and we need this

We need to be robust.

We need to win more than 50% of our 50-50 challenges, more than 50% of our aerial combats.

We need to be winning them more.

We're a good side.

We're a skillful side.

We can do good things when we've got the ball, but getting the ball back is something that we want to be better at.

We want the other team to say when they line up against us on a Saturday afternoon, my goodness me, they're big.

And I think they're going to bite our ankles as well in a legitimate way, of course.

So this fellow, it sounds like he's a pretty darn good acquisition.

So if he turns out for them against us on Saturday, what have we got?

We don't know.

Very little is known about him.

He hasn't played for his first team.

He's played nine games for the kind of Man City reserves.

Mind you, that's going to be a heck of a side, of course.

And he's obviously got really good DNA because those old enough to remember his dad, Emil Heskey, will remember a guy who burst on the scene.

He was a tremendous athlete, a physical presence.

I remember one defender saying that he was chasing the ball down and he heard Emil Heskey coming up behind him and he said it was like being chased by Usain Bolt and then being hit by Mike Tyson.