AUGUSTINE "Jay Jay" Okocha admits to not following his former club Eintracht Frankfurt much. “I watch them sometimes but not a lot. And they are not really doing well,” the Nigerian legend said.
But perhaps he should watch them a little more, given that Frankfurt have on their books one of the hottest young properties in the Bundesliga.
Frenchman Sebastien Haller has taken the league by storm and has been partly responsible for Frankfurt’s five wins from their 13 matches and a good number of their 14 goals.
A fully-committed and hard-working striker, the 23-year-old has won the Bundesliga/Tag Heuer Rookie award for October, beating the likes of Hanover’s Ihlas Bebou and Stuttgart's Benjamin Pravard.
Haller’s success is not surprising - he narrowly missed out on the September award which was won by Borussia Dortmund’s Dan-Axel Zagadou.
But in October, there was only one shining rookie - the Eintracht forward who threw himself into 141 challenges, the second most of all Bundesliga players in the period.
But if he was good at tackling, Haller was excellent in his main role - scoring goals. Haller had nine shots at goal in October and scored three of those. And he added an assist.
“Scoring and making assists every game of course, that is something nice,” Haller said.
But probably not as nice as walking away with the coveted Rookie of the Month title that says to the rest of the league, "here’s a young player worth looking at".
Now that he has attained acclaim, what are the chances of Haller continuing with his impressive form and helping Eintracht move steadily up the table?
The French under-21 international joined the club after they’d had a pathetic second half of last season.
That it was he Eintracht chose had a lot to do with his form in the Dutch Eredivisie, where he’d scored 41 times in 82 matches for FC Utrecht. Anything close to that in his first season in the Bundesliga and even Okocha himself is bound to take notice.