Arsenal: Granit Xhaka growing his strength by leaps and bounds

Arsenal’s win over Swansea City had a good deal of nerves attached, but Granit Xhaka was a calming presence. Apparently only for some, though.

It was a usual Arsenal match for a lot of reasons. A home match that should have been relatively easy against lower-half Swansea City turned out to be anything but, as the Swans struck first on a ball that was just horrible dealt with, particularly by our dear keeper.

It was also an ordinary match in that there was a complete split decision on Granit Xhaka. All throughout social media, there was baseless accusations of him being blind, inept and just downright poor.

I didn’t see it. I saw a classic case of scapegoating.

It always has to come down to a matter of who people find it the easiest to pick on. That’s one thing that Arsenal twitter does very well (aside from winning polls), they pick out a player who makes a flaw and let that flaw determine their grade for the entire match.

Granit Xhaka had his flaws, just as much as anyone else did, but one thing he continues to do on a match-by-match basis is excel at his strengths. And by strengths, I mean passing. And by passing, I mean his ability to drop a fifty yard pass on the drop of a dime.

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But it wasn’t just a matter of spreading the field, like he normally does. That’s the strength he came here with and the one that we are used to. The defense gets pulled like salt-water taffy and it opens up space for the attackers.

Against Swansea, he was doing another thing that was pretty darn cool – he was serving balls, not just left, right and across the pitch, but into the box. And he wasn’t just pumping senseless, aimless balls into the general area, he was delivering workable balls into the box.

If it wasn’t for a total lack of physical presence within the 18 yard box, the numbers would back me up on this. Unfortunately, Xhaka ended the game with zero creates chances, so taking it as a statistical outing, Xhaka was not effective.

But if you go back and watch him, you will see him doing this same thing a handful of times, lofting balls into the box from all over the place – dangerous balls that could have led to chances given the right personnel.

Next: 5 Things Learned Against Swansea City

It makes me salivate thinking about how effective that kind of placement would have been with Olivier Giroud‘s knockdown ability. But I’ll just have to keep waiting on that pairing.

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