Arsenal youngster Alex Iwobi likened to Jay-Jay Okocha and Edgar Davids

Arsenal youngster Alex Iwobi has been hailed as a mixture of Jay-Jay Okocha and Edgar Davids by Gunners teammate Mesut Ozil. The 20-year-old midfielder produced another eye-catching performance during Arsenal's one-sided 2-0 win against Basel in the Champions League and Ozil has been quick to heap praise on the Nigerian.

According to the World Cup-winning star, Iwobi has the physical strength and creative skills to become a real star at the Emirates Stadium in the coming years. "He reminds me of his uncle, Jay-Jay Okocha," Ozil said, according to The Sun. "He was a player I loved watching.

"Alex reminds me of a mixture of him and Edgar Davids. He's really strong on the ball, also defensively, but he's good in front of goal too."

Iwobi made his Arsenal debut in September 2013 in a League Cup tie. Last season, however, he became a regular member of the first-team squad at Arsenal and has continued to play a prominent role in the current campaign.

Ozil thinks Iwobi is making rapid progress at Arsenal and is working under the ideal manager in Arsene Wenger. "He's developing really well and if he continues the way he's been playing for the whole season, he will enhance his game," Iwobi said. "The manager knows exactly how good he is and I wish him all the best."

Wenger, meanwhile, has hailed Iwobi's seamless introduction into the first-team set-up, saying the youngster has gone about his work in an undemonstrative fashion. "Alex has a discreet way of assessing his place in the team. He doesn't talk a lot and he's not what you'd call a flashy player," the Arsenal boss explained, according to the Evening Standard.

"He's a player who connects the team, and that's why I think he's integrated so quickly – because our game is based on those combinations.

"At the start nobody talked too much about him, because he does his job very well. But now people realise more and more that he can play at a high pace, that he has real quality, he works for the team, and when it comes to distributing the ball, he does that very intelligently.

"When the ball gets to him, you always feel the game can become quicker now. He's developed that in the last 18 months. When I saw him in the youth team, he was more of a dribbler, an individual player. He's slowly discovered from training with the first team that he needed to find a mixture between the individual and the collective game. That mixture is right now."