WATFORD-BOUND striker Joao Pedro has only just turned 18. But the young Brazilian has already acquired enough experience to see both sides of the game.
He came up the ranks with Fluminense, a traditional club in Rio de Janeiro. This was the club that sold Richarlison to Watford and the Hertfordshire clubs ever efficient scouting network lined up another splendid piece of business.
They spotted Joao Pedro slotting in the goals for the Fluminense youth side, and took out an option on the player.
With a flurry of goals, Joao Pedro made his mark on the professional game when he got into the senior side towards the end of May.
Most notably, there was a superb hat trick against Atletico Nacional, a top Colombian side, in the South American equivalent of the Europa League.
Everything he hot found the back of the net. In next to no time he had raced to ten senior goals. He had gone from unknown to household name in the course of a month.
But however good the player, however promising, this was too good to be true.
GOALS HAVE DRIED UP
Even the best go through bad patches. The goals have dried up.
He has been denied by VAR and by the crossbar, and has not found the target since early September more than 800 minutes of playing time ago.
Parts of the crowd have started getting on his back. He was booed last week and had to settle for a place on the bench in Sundays big derby against Flamengo.
He has reportedly had a run in with supporters outside a restaurant, yelling at him to run harder, attacking him for attending the Rock in Rio festival while he and his team are going through a bad patch.
Little of this is his fault. Brazilian fans are notoriously impatient and demanding, and increasingly aggressive.
And, after all, he is a raw youngster leading the attack of a team who are playing badly with 11 of the 38 rounds to go in the Brazilian league, Fluminense hover worryingly just above the relegation zone.
Without Muriel, the older brother of Liverpools Alisson, in goal, things would be worse.
STILL LEARNING
Joao Pedro, then, is learning his trade under pressure and could well be learning more from this bad patch than from those golden few weeks when everything went right.
But the big lesson here is the one to be learned by Watford fans. The player is expected to cross the Atlantic in January.
There seems to be some hope in Hertfordshire that he might be the solution to the clubs dismal start to the Premier League campaign. Such thinking is surely premature.
Joao Pedro is indeed a magnificent prospect. With his rangy build, fluidity of movement and calm decision making, there may well be something in him of the young original Ronaldo.
But there is little sign yet of the asset that made Ronaldo at his best all but unstoppable the extreme pace running with the ball.
Moreover, Ronaldo at 18 was not thrown into a relegation dogfight in the Premier League. He could develop in more gentle surroundings with PSV Eindhoven, a club that was expected to win most of its Dutch league games.
Joao Pedro may well be a wonderful player for Watford, both in terms of performances on the field and in the money he may command from a future transfer deal.
And he may well take the Premier League by storm. But almost certainly not as soon as January 2020.
