Arsenal: Baseless Granit Xhaka criticism balloons his expanding ceiling

Arsenal’s midfield certainly needs solution, but bear in mind that Granit Xhaka still has a ceiling that is only getting higher and higher.

As it stands, several writers here at Pain in the Arsenal have either submitted or are working on articles that are less than flattering for Granit Xhaka, so, being the person that I am, I thought to go ahead and nip all the nay-saying in the bid by preemptively stabbing it with this here article.

Granit Xhaka isn’t the perfect midfielder. Obviously. The perfect midfielder doesn’t exist right now. Not N’Golo Kante, not Toni Kroos, not Miralem Pjanic. There’s no such thing. There is a such thing as a perfect fit, and there are some interesting candidates out there for Arsenal to pursue in order to complete a midfield clearly one guy off from being a formidable force.

Meanwhile, Granit Xhaka is still a huge piece of that midfield and he can be an even bigger one given his upside and the gradual progress he is making towards that upside.

This may be hard for some people to understand, but Xhaka is improving. Since his inaugural year last year, he has essentially erased his disciplinary problems, his lash-outs and poor tackles, and his defensive woes are improving as well.

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I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, Xhaka is fourth on the team when it comes to defensive statistics. Only Koscielny, Mustafi and Monreal have a better provable record of winning the ball back and that’s their primary job. It’s not Xhaka’s.

Defensively, I don’t think many people expected him to become any sort of force. The fact that he is showing improvements in this area – with more still to be made – bumps his potential up even higher. Mostly because few others seem to care that he is improving, they just assume he hasn’t changed since last year.

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From there, we have to look at passing. He has had his problems with passing this year, particularly short passing, but watch him again against Tottenham (if you can stomach the match). Not only was he not part of the problem, he was actually one of the few guys that handled the pressure really well and made intelligent, sharp passes forward.

Plus, now that Xhaka is being move out of that deeper midfield position into a more comfortable box-to-box role, he is going to start having more opportunities to make meaningful passes that can lead to goals, which people will notice.

Then there are the strengths he already has, that so casually get glossed over. He literally never has the ball taken from him. He is arguably the best long passer in the world and he is a threat to score from distance if he can get a clean attempt.

He is only 25 years old and he has a building arsenal of strengths. The weaknesses he had last year are, or have already, died out. The next step is to cut out the errant short passes, which is a pretty simple fix. He just needs to work on it.

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You want to talk about upside and potential, Xhaka has some of the more exciting upside of the bunch, and it’s only getting better by the day.

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