Stoking the flames

Anthony Stokes is scoring goals for fun and writing his own headlines. Now comes the hard part — meeting absurd expectation. The young Irish striker spoke to Liam Mackey.

HOT. Scorching. On fire. The headline writers are running out of inflammable phrases to describe the form of Anthony Stokes, the 18-year-old Dubliner who is currently the talk of Scottish and Irish football and whose surname is hardly an impediment to the deployment of ever more incendiary language.

Before this page spontaneously combusts then, better perhaps to say that the Arsenal loanee at Falkirk is currently enjoying such a purple patch in front of goal that even when things go wrong for him, they come out right in the end.