Arsenal: Shkodran Mustafi has pockets full of Chelsea strikers

Arsenal’s defense came out to play against Chelsea and yet again we were treated to Shkodran Mustafi pocketing a Blue-shirted striker.

Arsenal should absolutely be proud of their performance against Chelsea. Not because it was a 0-0 draw necessarily, but because of how strong they looked. And the players are speaking along these same lines. This showed that the Gunners can compete and they did it without the two wantaways in Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez.

The big winner on the day was the defense. Putting Shkodran Mustafi in the middle of the pitch looked to be a masterstroke, as his coordination of the defense made them look the best they’ve looked all year.

Not just that, but individually, Mustafi was an absolute stalwart. Alvaro Morata was rendered absolutely useless. Meaning that the German climbed the bean stalk all the way up to that “higher level” that Paul Merson thinks Morata is on, plucked him from that level, put him in his pocket and shimmied back down the bean stalk to play the game.

Morata could be seen ranting and raving at the referee over being manhandled by Mustafi, but if you go back and look at the challenges, they were either completely fair or it was Morata at fault (we all saw that shirt tug).

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Mustafi stepped up and removed the tip of the spear from Chelsea’s attack. And this isn’t the first time he has done that. In his first ever performance against Chelsea, when everyone was fretting about Diego Costa getting the best of him, the Flintstones look-a-like ended up being stowed safely in Mustafi’s pocket by half.

And the entire time he was doing the exact same thing, ranting and raving at the referee for getting manhandled by the German. Guess what? In the exact same fashion, most of those challenges were ruled correctly. Mustafi was simply better.

That means that two separate times, Mustafi has completely negated these “fear-inducing” strikers that Chelsea has. Two times he has pocketed them. We often slate Gunners for not stepping up in big games, but this is a whole new level of stepping up. This defense is not easy to keep cohesive, as we have seen, but Mustafi was the central piece of that while stuffing away Chelsea’s leading goal scorer.

Next: 5 Things Learned Against Chelsea

I don’t know where the tumors came from this summer that Mustafi was deemed “not of enough quality” for Arsenal. For the sake of them being absolutely wrong, let’s just assume that they were false rumors. Because if there is one way I would describe Mustafi, it would be “top quality.”

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