Arsenal: Mesut Ozil’s ‘faults’ aren’t his responsibility to fix

Mesut Ozil has seemingly become the scapegoat of Arsenal, but are the German maestro’s ‘faults’ even his to fix? Perhaps not.

Just about everyone is out there lambasting Mesut Ozil for being a passenger on this Arsenal attack. They accuse him of being invisible, irrelevant and numerous other unflattering things. And I’ll admit I’ve been harsh on him as well. Mostly because so much of what he does simply doesn’t get noticed.

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And that all comes down to the simple fact that the one major thing he does – creating chances – is bound to go unnoticed if those chances aren’t becoming goals.

You see, Ozil has created the most chances of anyone in the Premier League. Believe it or not. It was actually quite a shock to me as well, because, as mentioned, I have been left wanting more from Ozil. All ten of his created chances are also short-pass chances, which also factors into the problem.

With Granit Xhaka, for instance, you see just about every chance he creates because he is firing in passes from deep, wide angles and everyone gawks at the ball as it flies through the air or pierces the gap on the ground.

But Ozil’s chances are in much tighter spaces and can go unseen much easier.

Which brings me to my point, a point that I feel I have made numerous times in the past, and that’s that it isn’t really up to Ozil to change who he is so much as it falls on Arsenal to give Ozil more to work with.

Arsene Wenger knew what he was getting when he signed Ozil. He was getting a creation specialist who wasn’t going to track back, wasn’t going to pursue a dispossession and wasn’t going to put the afterburners on and scorch opposing defenses.

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So expecting him to do those things now, simply because we don’t see him doing it, is unfair. Ozil is here to do that one thing – he is here to create chances. Which he has done better than anyone else.

The fact that he has yet to register a goal or an assist doesn’t help either, but again, he can only do so much. You can’t blame the man who made the chance if the finisher didn’t finish, and that’s been the case so far with Ozil.

After all, what are you going to notice more? When Ozil gets bullied off the ball and the opposition goes racing the other way or when Ozil slips a ball into, say, Danny Welbeck and the Englishman punts the ball wide of the mark?

The answer is the former. Because it is ongoing and it is tense and you can trace the problem back to its origin.

But everyone loses the ball on occasion. And Ozil only gets dispossessed twice a game on average. That is hardly a problem given the nature of his position.

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Essentially, what I’m getting at here is that Ozil doesn’t have any problems as it stands. He is living up to his end of the bargain. The numbers don’t lie about that. We just need to see those chances he’s creating finding the back of the net more often.