Mathieu Flamini is one of those players who is a complete mystery to me.

I don’t know what to make of him, how to read him or judge his intentions.

After he left Arsenal in 2008 for Milan, I was a little skeptical of his motivation to come back. He then went on the become something of a liability to the team; he’d go steaming into challenges, get yellow-carded, leaving us holding our breath for the second yellow and being reduced to 10 men.

He’s somehow still at the club, despite us not really having a need for him; despite Coquelin’s and Arteta’s injuries, I’m sure we’d have another replacement if Flamini wasn’t there.

The Frenchman now wants to prove why he should be in the starting 11 and alluded to the reason that he’s not so sharp on the pitch is because he doesn’t get much game time.

“Fitness is hard to maintain,” Mr. Moneybags revealed.

“For an athlete, if you don’t play every week, it’s not easy because the more games you have in your legs, the better you become. You gain in confidence, you become better physically, so the possibility to have game after game is obviously going to be good for me.”

A likely story, Mathieu.

While he does raise a correct point, I’m not convinced that Flamini’s ‘rugged’ style of football and sometimes bizarre decision making is purely down to lack of game time…