XHAKA SUMS UP ARSENAL: NO BOTTLE AND NO LEADERSHIP
IF Granit Xhaka had somehow signed for a club who were genuine title contenders he would have been booted out the door six months after walking through it.
The Arsenal midfielder, sent off on Sunday for petulantly grabbing Burnley’s Ashley Westwood by the throat, is a faux hard man whose unique selling point is tackling and breaking up play.
But he’s not hard, good at tackling or breaking up play.
And characters like him must have Roy Keane and Graeme Souness itching to get their boots back on.
Let’s be honest, both of them would have more influence on the pitch even now than Xhaka has. After seeing his dismissal, I was intrigued to hear what his manager, Mikel Arteta, had to say.
Essentially, it was just that the Switzerland star had been overexuberant. Arteta, therefore, has to take some of the blame as well.
He has had a year now to drill into Xhaka that he is in the most important part of the field and he’s there to do the hard work but not go chucking himself into silly challenges, especially when he’s already on a yellow.
What I saw again on Sunday, and not just from Xhaka (right) but the whole Gunners team, was a lack of bottle and leadership.
It makes me think that g iving Pierre- Emerick Aubameyang £ 250,000 a week is coming home to roost, because when the chips are down, the lads on £75,000 a week start to say, ‘ Well, if he’s not trying his hardest, why should I?’
Things like that have a major impact in dressing rooms and Arteta must now be hoping he can just get a few results before Christmas.
Otherwise, the ‘project’ will lose such a significant part of the fanbase that we will have another ‘ Ole’ situation on our hands, where we are waiting for when, rather than if, he goes.
That unde r m i n e s everything good Arteta can do. And at least Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Manchester United have a good recent record in the league to look at, as well as that nagging feeling in the backs of their minds that their side isn’t a million miles away.
The fact is, Arsenal are. If they are not careful they could well be looking at the sort of momentum Leicester enjoyed in their miracle season working in reverse, leaving them looking uncomfortably over their shoulders. That’s not a joke, because the Gunners are a club genuinely in crisis.
It’s what can happen when a squad which has no leaders meets rookie management, meets an agent too involved and meets an ownership seemingly happy with mediocrity providing the tills keep ringing.
For all of the above, I still give Arteta props for trying something different since he arrived a year ago.
But the whole team is now discovering that they are not as good as they thought they were – and we are about to see what sort of manager the Spaniard really is.
Can he say, ‘Right, roll up your sleeves, we’re going to drive through this’?
Or will he just stick to the pretty patterns that are all very well in the dog days of August and September?
We shall see. But sooner rather than later, whatever they are saying publicly, I can see Arsenal bottling it and going for a manager with more resilience.