Arsenal: Don’t mind Granit Xhaka, appointing himself the pack mule

LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 15: Granit Xhaka of Arsenal keeps the ball from Riccardo Montolivo of AC Milan during the UEFA Europa League Round of 16 Second Leg match between Arsenal and AC Milan at Emirates Stadium on March 15, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)
LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 15: Granit Xhaka of Arsenal keeps the ball from Riccardo Montolivo of AC Milan during the UEFA Europa League Round of 16 Second Leg match between Arsenal and AC Milan at Emirates Stadium on March 15, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images) /
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Arsenal’s second leg win over AC Milan had many stand-outs, but yet again, Granit Xhaka was among them. But most people still cling to expired notions.

Arsenal conclusively saw out the second leg of the AC Milan clash by a score of 3-1, with Granit Xhaka scoring a goal that many questioned the legitimacy of. There comes a point where a man earns a goal, not because of the nature of the goal, but because of the work he has done to get there.

Consider this over-elaborate analogy. A collection of warriors go on an adventure – mages, warriors, archers, and the like. They are doing the glorious work, the killing and the slaying and the being awesome, but there in the back, behind all of them, is a pack mule carrying all the foodstuffs and rations and weapons that no one can be bothered to carry.

The mule isn’t going to get a lot of praise. I mean, it’s a mule. If carrying everyone else’s work was glamorous, more people would do it and they wouldn’t need a pack mule in the first place.

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Granit Xhaka is that pack mule. It wasn’t a glorious day for him and, granted, he isn’t always the pack mule, he does have glorious days, particularly on the defensive end lately, but against AC Milan, he did his work from deep and picked up everyone else’s slack.

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He was a baggage carrier, necessary, but underappreciated. And then he snagged himself a generous goal and of course, people want to discredit it, or at the very least question if it should have been scored.

Let’s revisit my analogy.

If the pack mule bucks out a leg in panic and kills a goblin, you appreciate that the mule is the hardest worker here, doing the work no one else can be troubled to do, and you grant him his K.O.

Xhaka earned that goal, not because it was a smashing effort, but because he was doing the dirty work all day, the work that Wilshere and Ozil and Ramsey don’t often do.

I have written and spoken a ton about Xhaka;’s versatility lately and he continues to showcase how he is becoming a Swiss army knife of a midfielder (see what I did there?) where he can play so many different roles, despite the apparent handicaps that people want to throw on him with their expired notions of what he is and isn’t capable of.

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Guess what, people? Xhaka is changing. He is improving and he is making it a consistent, regular thing now, so your belief that he is still not capable of defending, or still a risk of making a rash tackle and getting sent off – it’s plain wrong. That isn’t him anymore.