Arsenal: One experimental duo down, one yet to go

Football is often a team build on partnerships, and that being the case, Arsenal need to follow up their strike duo with a new defensive duo.

Arsenal finally found the chance to start Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang together. It was rather fruitful, though one has to question if this is what Aubameyang wanted with himself when he left Borussia Dortmund.

As of right, he may not be thinking about it, but in time, it could come up. In a sense, it feels like a step backwards for him, position-wise.

But overall, the partnership worked. It’s a pairing that we’ve wanted to see for some time, as well as one that they have been wanting to experience for some time, so it all appears to be rather peachy.

Now it’s time to move on to the next experimental duo. This one with far more upside (in terms of longevity) but also far more hesitation and potential for failure. Far more.

This defense needs a solution, and so many partnerships are being tried and subsequently failing. In the essence of thinking for the future, however, it’s crucial that we turn to the two young Englishman, Rob Holding and Calum Chambers, and play them together at the back.

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By doing so, ideally, you start the cohesion of our future defensive anchors. They can start to build a rapport on the pitch as much as they have off the pitch and in a perfect world, you can just hand two young 20-somethings the keys to the defense and take a step back and not worry about it.

But we won’t know their capacity until it’s given a chance.

The last time these two started together in a back two was the start of last season against Liverpool. They were absolutely torched and, in response, Chambers was sent out on loan to Middlesbrough, where he actually had quite a positive experience.

Both of these young men show a high ceiling, with tons of room to grow, and they should be counted as part of this youth experimentation going forward. Everyone wants to go gangbusters after a world class defender, but I would hate for that to happen before we even fully realize what we have in Holding and Chambers, the latter of whom is ready for consistent Premier League action and the former of whom has proven himself more than capable more times than not.

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Play them together, because it can’t get much worse than what we are experiencing, and the potential payoff is absolutely massive.

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