If we, as a fanbase, don’t know what we want for our club then surely Mesut Ozil is the perfect poster child.
It has become a badge of honour to choose a polarising view when it comes to our German playmaker. Forget Fifty Shades of Grey, there are just two – black and white.
For those of a positive persuasion, you’d be forgiven for thinking Mesut is the long-lost lovechild of Dennis Bergkamp and Cesc Fabregas, mixing vision and technique into a perfectly brewed cocktail.
For the balance of people, Ozil can best be likened to the second coming of Jordan Henderson…except there are still some deluded people who actually rate the pointlessly pedestrian Liverpool captain!
If you are in ‘Camp White’, you know the statistics of Ozil’s chances created inside out, and blame his teammates’ wayward finishing as the reason that he doesn’t have roughly double the number of assists. And for those who haven’t paid the membership fee to this not-so-secret society, then you just don’t understand football well enough to get his brilliance…in fact why are you even still here? You’re not a “real” fan…
Over in ‘Camp Black’, meanwhile, it’s more fun to gloss over his running stats and decry Mesut’s laziness, or perhaps his implied tendency to sulk. Certainly it’s a camp that many of the print media “journalists” are overly familiar with. And when he does score or provide an assist, that’s all well and good, but he still doesn’t do it often enough, or in the big games when the pressure is on.
Leadership comes in all shapes and sizes
One of the biggest criticisms levelled at Mesut, though, is that he lacks the ability to drag his team into a game by himself.
But part of that is down to the type of player he is.
Just as a goalkeeper can never drag you back into a game single-handedly, nor can the player whose role is to grease the wheels for others.
Ozil isn’t a player who tends, Everton notwithstanding, to lead from the front, mostly because the areas he operates in and the type of skills he specialises in don’t lend that to him, in direct contrast to the likes of Alexis who are endowed with different but complimentary skills such as shooting ability and taking players on.
No, Mesut is the type of player whose main purpose is to extract the maximum from his teammates.
But that does require them to do the right things.