Theo, Theo, Theo, what are we to do with you?

As we looked at in our main Theo Walcott Player Focus on Saturday, the winger wasn’t quite as poor as he has been recently and was certainly showing a willingness to get stuck in, even if he hasn’t quite worked out how one should go about doing that. He wants to, and that’s huge for not-so-young-anymore Theo.

With a whoscored rating of 6.34, only two Arsenal players picked up lower ratings and one of those was Alexis who was only on the pitch for 29 minutes. The other was Lucas Perez who picked up Arsenal’s lowest rating, but we already looked at why that doesn’t matter.

Sometimes, when you watch a game on the TV, you can be left with an impression that is quite different than the one you would have got had you been at the stadium, so I thought I’d take a look at Theo’s pass map to see how effective he’d been in creating chances or openings.

Yeah.

For a little bit of a contrast, here’s Hector Bellerin’s:

While it should be noted that the lack of movement around Theo made it hard for him to find someone to pass to, there’s no denying this sort of map and stat set are more the rule than exception for him these days.

Can he change it?

Hopefully the more ‘forceful’ Theo we’ve been seeing flashes of this season means that he is, at the very least, trying.