Arsenal: Mesut Ozil Drilling Himself Into Deeper Hole

Arsenal’s deflating loss to Tottenham had numerous token gaffs, namely Mesut Ozil, but his new set of problems only bury him more.

Mesut Ozil had a few moments in Arsenal’s deafening loss to Tottenham where he looked likehe had a pretty good idea what he was doing. And that is where my praise of his performance ends. Because aside from those few token moments, there was nothing.

I am trying to hard to find what the eternal Ozil apologists claim are his “subtle moments that you really have to appreciate football to see” and either I don’t appreciate this wonderful sport (and millions of others don’t) or these few apologists making that claim are just trying to pull one over on the rest of us that never see the same Ozil as we saw a year ago.

And the problems keep mounting for the German. In this monumental North London Derby, we saw a brand new problem develop: Ozil had nowhere to hide.

The way this 3-4-3 is supposed to work, or at least how it seems the most logical, is that Ozil and Alexis Sanchez are sharing that middle attacking ground, shaded to one side or the other, while Kieran Gibbs and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain provide the speed out wide.

It seemed brilliant. So much of my criticism of Ozil came from my belief that he couldn’t do it all on his own. The No. 10 role is a vital position and someone who operates best out of the spotlight, like Ozil, is not going to thrive there.

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The 3-4-3 has failed him as well because, from what it looks like, Ozil is trying to use his new position to hide somewhere between Oxlade-Chamberlain and Aaron Ramsey. He’s trying to find some magical space on the pitch where he won’t be under pressure and where he will have time to dwell on then ball.

But this hidden, free-range Narnia zone doesn’t exist. So what ended up happening is that, while Ozil wasn’t pressing, Ramsey was. And that left Ozil the deepest of the three midfielders, which meant that he had to defend. Which he doesn’t do either.

So then the midfield was wide open, barring a recovery from Oxlade-Chamberlain or Ramsey. At which point Ozil would reset in his usual position. But then the attack would pass him by as he dug for space and in the end, the same result occurred, he was furthest back and incapable to stop much of anything.

I don’t remember who said it, but it was summed up perfectly in the match when one of the announcers said “Ozil is a passenger.” That was it, the nail on the head. Ozil wants to be unnoticed so he can operate freely but that is never going to happen.

And to be fair, some of the fault goes to Alexis, because he is going even wider than Ozil, leaving Ozil yet again isolated.

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This is a serious problem. We now have tried two formations and neither one seems to have a place for the German to find the consistency that he needs.