Shaquille Gwengwe has not eased his way into League Two. He has torn straight into it.
Four goals in August for Newport County, straight off the back of a 47-goal haul for Poole Town last season, have earned the forward a League Two player of the month nomination and the immediate respect of his new dressing room. For a player jumping from Southern League Premier South to the EFL in one leap, this is not supposed to be how it looks. It looks like he has been here for years.
Hayden Mullins sees the numbers. What impresses him more is the attitude.
“Rightly deserved, with four goals in five games. He works incredibly hard,” the Newport boss said, framing the nomination as a natural consequence of graft rather than a bolt from the blue. Gwengwe, 25, has walked into a professional environment and treated it like a classroom, not a reward.
“He always wants to work on areas of his game which he feels might help him to develop,” Mullins explained. “He's not come into the group and sat back; he's come in, and he really wants to push. He's got a lot to learn, but he's really open and wants to improve. His product is the by-product of all his hard work.”
That “product” has arrived from an unfamiliar position. Gwengwe prefers to operate through the middle, yet all four of his goals in August came from a wide role. Instead of sulking about it, he has turned the flank into a launchpad.
The nomination places him alongside Barnet’s Charlie Larkin, Crewe striker Josh March and York City’s Harry Boyes, who ultimately took the award. In that company, the former non-league marksman is the outlier, the one who has skipped the usual stepping stones. He has jumped “a lot of levels very quickly,” as Mullins puts it, and is still landing on his feet.
The manager is already thinking about what comes next.
“The good thing is he is open-minded. Wherever he can get into the team, he'll play and try and do a job,” Mullins said. “He could be equally effective through the middle, but maybe we have to change a few things to help that.
“With every game he's gaining more experience. Once he figures out the different challenges at this level, there's no reason why he couldn't play as the nine.”
That is the intriguing part for Newport: this might only be the starting version of Gwengwe. The wide forward who presses, runs, stretches defences and still finds time to finish. The central striker he could become is still being built on the training ground.
Inside the squad, his impact has been immediate and obvious. Midfielder Ciaran Brennan has seen enough to label him a difference-maker.
“Shaq definitely knows where the goal is, so when he's on the pitch there's always half a chance that he might sniff something out,” Brennan said.
A player stepping up from non-league is not supposed to make League Two defenders nervous every time he drifts into the box. Gwengwe does. The nomination is a marker of that, a sign that the rest of the division has noticed what Newport have found.
If this is how he looks in his first month as an EFL player, the real question is how far – and how fast – he can go once he truly settles into life as Newport’s number nine.
