Crystal Palace star Wilfried Zaha recalled a hilarious incident with Arsenal attacker Nicolas Pepe during their time together with the Ivory Coast national team.
It is no secret that Unai Emery preferred the Eagles star over Pepe in the summer of 2019. The then Arsenal boss couldn’t convince the board to sign Zaha and he had to settle with the former Lille man instead.
Seeing a compatriot move to a club that you wanted to go to is never easy. Pepe’s arrival at Arsenal may have annoyed Zaha a bit, but what the Arsenal man did during their time together with the national team annoyed him a whole lot more.
Zaha said On The Judy Podcast: “Bro, oh my days, Nicolas Pepe. I asked to leave the room. I went and asked to leave the room because he sounded like a motorbike. It was mad. Bro, it was crazy. It was crazy.
“I was like ‘no, I cannot’. These were the first times that I went and I was with Nico. They let me move and share rooms with Kalou. And he was like ‘bro, I know, I know, I moved myself’.”
Pepe’s noisy both on and off the pitch
Pepe had a difficult start to life at Arsenal but he is starting to make all the right noises. He has been brilliant in recent weeks, and with a bit of luck going forward, he will end up scoring plenty of goals.
There are a bunch of Arsenal fans who still prefer Zaha over Pepe. Emery did the same as well, but signing Pepe was the right move, even if things haven’t quite worked out like we wanted to.
Pepe has a higher ceiling than his compatriot. He is younger as well and with the right management, he has quality to become one of the best players in the Premier League very soon.
The former Lille man may sound like a motorbike when he’s asleep but he can be a Ferrari on the pitch. Pepe has stepped up massively over the last few weeks, but there is a lot more still to come, and when it does, he will be unstoppable.
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