Mesut Ozil is often the subject of criticism at Arsenal. The German playmaker is an easy target who often takes the blame for other’s failings.
Blame Mesut Ozil. It’s easy enough. He walks around, doesn’t track back, doesn’t press, goes missing, is a flat-track bully and cares about little outside himself. Whenever Arsenal lose a game, this is usually the crux of the criticism people will throw at Ozil for his performance.
You can skip the game and watch something else, and people will still blindly bring up the same complaints about Mesut Ozil. You know why? Because some of them are true. The failings never change, either. It’s kind of who he is, in that sense.
He’s a typical number 10 who offers great creativity and technique when the team have the ball. But isn’t about to set about winning the ball back beforehand. If Arsenal don’t have possession, then you can often forget he’s even on the pitch. His demeanour is very… casual, at times.
But is this something new? No. Ozil has always been this way. Always. That’s who he is as a person. His character. Is he the only one? Again, no. There are a plethora of talented number 10s in the world who are exactly like this.
In many ways, that’s what a number 10 is. It’s a supremely talented player who has little to no defensive duties. That’s the job description. Ozil plays the role he is given. The players around him? Now that’s where the issue is.
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To play a number 10, you need to set the team up to cover for what you are going to lose. Balance the team out. Arsenal, however, are completely unbalanced. Behind a low-work rate player like Ozil, you usually find poor defensive players like Santi Cazorla, Granit Xhaka or Aaron Ramsey.
Behind those, you usually find more poor defensive individuals. It’s a recipe for disaster. Behind Ozil, Arsene Wenger needs to field two hard-working midfielders who can actually defend and control the engine room. Then Ozil’s talents will shine through after that.
Does that excuse Ozil for parading around like he’s on a Sunday morning stroll? Of course not. The playmaker should work a little harder than he does – even if he’s spent his career having teams built around him to allow him to stroll around.
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But the difference now at Arsenal, is not Ozil. It’s Arsenal. Where other teams are balanced out to account for Ozil, the Gunners aren’t. And when things then go wrong, Ozil is then an easy target. This is the same Mesut Ozil that Real Madrid fans were fuming about because the club sold him.
Was that because he was working his socks off in Madrid? No, it was because his talent shone through with the likes of Sami Khedira doing all of his dirty work in midfield. Arsenal are not built to get the best out of Ozil.
Ozil goes missing in big games, they say. You know who goes missing in big games? Arsenal. That’s who. Why? Because they don’t approach it like a big game. They approach it like it’s any other game.
So when they can’t garner the same amount of possession as any other game, they get exposed. Exposed defensively because the team is unbalanced. But those things don’t get brought up. Why when you can just blame Ozil? It’s easy.
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Ozil has his failings as he does his strengths. That’s indisputable. But the way Arsenal are set up only highlights his weaknesses when things go wrong. On the face of it, Ozil, sauntering around the pitch, is the one to blame.
But once you look beneath the surface, you see the problem isn’t necessarily always Mesut Ozil. A lot of the time it’s the failings of the team around him.