Arsenal: Gabriel Paulista’s Lukaku Magic Needed Against Christian Benteke

Arsenal faces a tough cookie in Christian Benteke, and they will need the new Gabriel Paulista to negate him like he has Romelu Lukaku.

Guess what team is fifteenth in the league in winning aerial duels? Arsenal.

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Guess what player leads the league in aerials won? Christian Benteke. 

It was the same reason why we were dreading facing Andy Carroll without Laurent Koscielny (or with him, even). Carroll is right up there with Benteke, only separated by 0.1 aerial duels.

“Well it’s settled then, we stopped Carroll, we can stop Benteke,” you say. And that’s a valid point and one we hope to see proven true, but the painful fact is that against West Ham, the Hammers hardly even tried to utilize Carroll’s aerial abilities. Or better yet, they just weren’t able to.

No starter attempted more than two crosses and most of them fell harmlessly to no one. There was not a lot of threat going on in the box. And while Carroll did win four aerial duels, that is less than half of his season average.

He was more often seen drifting back, trying to help his team get forward. As we know from our frustrations when Olivier Giroud has to do that – it doesn’t work.

Benteke is a different story.

Look at what he did against Chelsea. 11 aerial duels won. And while he didn’t see all that many crosses, what crosses he did see, the team was prepared for. It was a calculated strategy, not a last ditch effort.

Against Arsenal, the key is going to be sticking to Benteke and making life hard for him when he gets into that comfort zone in the box. Thankfully, Gabriel Paulista has a certain specialty, even from the first moment he came to the Emirates, and that is it.

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Hearken back to when the Brazilian was tasked with stopping Romelu Lukaku. Regarded as one of the fiercest strikers in the game, utilizing both his physical dominance and his athletic superiority, Lukaku was supposed to skewer a a susceptible defense, but Gabriel showed us that despite what downfalls we had noted, when it came to fearlessly standing up to a strong physical presence, he was your man.

His ability to nick the ball away and step in right at the crunch was obvious and there is reason to think that we will see more of that against Crystal Palace.

Mainly because Gabriel has a new directive that involves sitting deeper. This allows him to dictate how far back the line goes. He is that last line of defense, which is how it should always be, given his ability to handle that kind of situation.

Again, think Lukaku.

Benteke can’t hurt us if they have to feed him further away from the box. Gabriel can’t do it all, but what he can do is stick to the Belgian like a backpack and not allow him any bit of comfort.

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That is what I call the Gabriel magic.