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Arsenal: Mesut Ozil-geddon Prepping Never Too Early
By Josh Sippie
Arsenal may be confident in their abilities to compensate for a Mesut Ozil departure, but when do you start prepping, and why haven’t we already been?
As I talked about earlier today, I don’t think it will be the end of the world if Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez leave Arsenal. Will it suck? Horribly. It will be like having a limb amputated. But this is a big club with ab big wallet and we can find someone else.
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Alexis Sanchez, for instance, is a big deal, but in the moment, the Gunners can compensate. Obviously not to the same level of quality, but they have talents that can help ease the pain that his exit would inflict.
Mesut Ozil is less sure. Take Mesut Ozil out of the No. 10 role and suddenly everyone is looking at each other with raised eyebrows like “that your hole to fill? That’s not my hole to fill.”
There is no back-up, no stopgap. Arsenal, as it stands, cannot cope with an Ozil departure.
I call it, as the title of the article suggests, Mesut Ozil-geddon. Because it would be like a damn nuclear holocaust if Ozil leaves and we aren’t ready.
You have to be ready for something like that. I get that Ozil wasn’t necessarily a replacement for Cesc Fabregas at long last, but why did it take so long for Snake Fabregas, I mean Cesc, to be fully covered for?
Maybe it was a matter of money.
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But now that that is no longer a problem, this looming disaster has to avoided. This doesn’t need to be the Cold War that it is becoming.
And really, Wenger could already have a plan and I may just be blowing steam. Maybe he has Wilshere or Ramsey ready to take the reigns (that won’t make fans happy) or maybe he has a little birdie on Isco’s shoulder telling him the spot is his if Ozil should move on.
But I can’t help but think that, given Wenger’s history, this potential disaster is not being prepped for and it should absolutely be. It’s never too early to start prepping for Ozil-geddon. You leave that until that last minute and that’s how you end up with something like Mikel Arteta as your chief holding midfielder.
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Again, I want to have faith that Wenger has a back-up plan, because it is never too soon to have a Plan B (something he seems way too opposed to), but I can’t help but second-guess.