Arsenal: Santi Cazorla Quickly Becoming A Crutch

Arsenal is a top tier team with top quality players. Any singular loss should not derail a season, but Santi Cazorla is quickly assuming the role that we don’t need.

Arsenal will likely be without Santi Cazorla for the rest of the season and that is something we have known for some time. The team has had to carry on with life without the Spaniard and it hasn’t worked all that well. And it only seems to be getting worse.

But this is Arsenal. This is a top tier club with tons of talented players capable of making a difference. And here we are still moaning the loss of Cazorla.

Arsene Wenger came out the other day and had this to say: “It’s frustrating for us because at the start of the season he was the star of the team.”

On the surface, yeah, this goes without saying. Of course someone with the talent of Cazorla is important to the club. But at the same time, why were we not prepared to cope with his loss? Why hadn’t we learned from last year, when the exact same thing happened.

And, along those lines, will we learn next year?

I hate excuses. I really do. If you lose a game, don’t blame the ref. If you miss a penalty, don’t blame the pitch conditions. You have a job to do and if you don’t do it, there are tons of factors that contributed to that failure.

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Not just one.

I feel like Cazorla is being used as a crutch for the season. There are a ton of voices out there chiming in on how “we lost Santi and that is when we lost the season.”

No, that’s not how it works. Santi Cazorla may be a major player on this team, but again, the only fault for not being able to cope with a singular loss is that we weren’t ready. Look what happened when Mustafi got hurt – Gabriel covered well. When Bellerin got hurt – Gabriel covered. With Welbeck hurt – Giroud and Alexis covered.

If the concept of having adequate cover works in these crucial positions, why wouldn’t it be just as easy to apply it to Cazorla’s position?

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I’m asking questions of the void, so I’m probably not going to find any answers here. But at the very least, I have to hope that Wenger learns from this and prepares the team for similar situations next year. That is, assuming he is still here.

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