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.
An exciting triumvirate
It’s why is as quite so exciting to finally see the Alexis-Lacazette-Ozil combination finally take the field, giving Mesut the raw materials to chisel into a thing of beauty.
In that game at Goodison Park, he created eight chances – the most by anyone in a single Premier League match this season – and it’s hardly a one off.
Since his Arsenal debut, Ozil has created more chances and provided more assists than any other player.
When push comes to shove, we want our players to be amazing at everything, but you need yin and yang across your team.
It no more works to have two destroyers in midfield than two lightweight creatives. And that makes it easy to forget that players can still be of enormous value to a team, in spite of their obvious and frustrating flaws.
Mesut Ozil’s languid style will always see him stymie and divide sections of the support. But it’s no surprise that the first game this season where he played with players of a similar quality to himself saw us create chances for fun, and ultimately run out comfortable winners in spite of our inability to defend.
Plenty of Premier League teams make a living these days from outscoring the opposition rather than worrying too much about how many they concede at the other end of the pitch.
While I would never advocate abandoning the defensive side of the game entirely, it certainly helps to have players of Mesut Ozil’s quality to help make up for deficiencies elsewhere.
He may not be a jack of all trades, by any stretch, but give him the right materials and Mesut Ozil is the master of one: making Arsenal tick.