With 16 goals to his name already so far this season, Emil Riis admits he goes in to each game confident of adding another to his growing collection.
The Danish forward has had the best scoring season of his career, netting 12 in the Championship on top of his four goals in the EFL Cup.
Four of those have come in his last five matches, and there is still plenty of time for him to hit the 20-goal mark and beyond.
Asked if he’s ever felt more confident in himself, he told iFollow PNE: “Not in my senior years. As a youth player I scored a lot of goals, but as a senior player this is the first time I’ve scored that many goals so I’m confident when I go on the pitch that I’m going to score goals.
“It’s always good to score goals, but it’s better to win the games. A lot of the goals I’ve been scoring have been to draw the game, so I would like to maybe get the winner but that’s how it is and obviously in the end I’m just happy to help the team.”
Despite his impressive figures on a personal basis, the 23-year-old knows there is still a lot left for him to learn.
Working under a former striker in manager Ryan Lowe can surely do him no harm, and with the recent addition of Cameron Archer on loan from Aston Villa, there’s plenty of combinations for him to be playing up top.
Emil added: “In front of the goal I’ve been scoring a lot of goals but a striker needs to do different things as well.
“I need to work on [my game] off the ball and receiving the ball and everything, it’s not only the finishing, so there’s definitely a lot of things I can learn.
“As a team you don’t want to be predictable, you don’t want to keep playing the same way, you have to switch it up sometimes so it’s good to have some different types [of forwards]."
Next up for Emil and PNE is a trip to Hull City this weekend, the side who they kicked off the current campaign against.
Things couldn’t have started much better, with Emil opening the scoring inside eight minutes, but the visitors would end up taking all three points back to Yorkshire.
Emil said: “Obviously we had a great start to the game. We went in front but really from there it was a bad game.
“It was a tough start to the season but we’ve turned it around and hopefully we beat them this time.
“The thing is it [the goal] was in front of the away end. Since then I’ve scored a few goals in front of the home end and I’ve enjoyed them more, but it was nice to score in front of the fans for the first time.”
Hear more from Emil in his full interview on iFollow PNE.