Arsenal: Mesut Ozil has upped his game in one crazy way

Arsenal benefited from a superb Mesut Ozil during their positive run post-Manchester City, but now, even in the struggles, the German has improved in one crazy way.

Arsenal’s loss to Manchester City wasn’t supposed to be the end. And when they came back after the international break that followed and ran rampant to three straight wins, it seemed like they may have some tricks up their sleeves. Especially with Mesut Ozil firing on all cylinders through those matches and even before.

But then the team faltered. First against Manchester United. Then Southampton. And then West Ham. Three matches that they dominated to every end, yet two draws and a loss.

In the process, you would think that Ozil’s influence would drop, sag, perhaps even disappear. It’s happened before. Even people who blindly accept his majesty and aren’t highly critical admit his downfalls.

But the opposite happened, in what I think has to be perhaps the craziest development in Mesut Ozil’s time with the Gunners. Rather than sink and fade with the team in those three matches, Ozil grew better. His influence was clearer, as he covered even more ground.

Yet, the truly crazy thing is in the statistics. He put up two goals and five assists in positive run what sandwiched the City loss. At the end of that run, he was creating 3.4 chances per game.

Since that time, he has gone four matches and scored just a goal. Hardly the continuation of what looked like a positive run. But bizarrely, one stat has improved in that time – his chances created.

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Rather than the 3.4 that was attached to that run, Ozil is now creating 3.6 chances per game. It may seem like chump change. Who actually cares about what literally equates to an added created chance every 450 minutes? But it’s not in the quantity of the change, but the nature of it.

Despite the team faltering, winning just one game in four, Ozil has defied the trend. He has bucked the belief that he is a passenger by stepping up his own game. It was capped off by his masterpiece against Newcastle, where he created eight whole chances and scored the only goal of the match.

For someone that is highly critical of the German, I couldn’t be happier to be in a position to be proved wrong. This is perhaps the one time of his Arsenal career where it’s clear that he is not accepting the fate of the team, but rather doing his best to change it.

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In turn, he is improving himself. Funny how that works. And how, ideally, it will continue to work.

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