Arsenal: Alexandre Lacazette “acclimation” has always been a hoax

Alexandre Lacazette’s early substitutions have been explained, and the Arsenal manager’s reasoning is as solid as you’d imagine. As in, it’s not.

It’s what everyone is talking about as if it’s some great secret. “Arsene Wenger reveals the reason why he’s been subbing Alexandre Lacazette inexplicably!” Yeah, except that it’s no great secret. For whatever reason, the Arsenal manager felt that Lacazette needed to acclimate.

After saying that fatigue played a part, and that Lacazette was primary subbed because because his performance would drop in the last 15-20 minutes, Wenger seemingly backed off on that, claiming that it wasn’t “physical”.

"He was in an adaptation period where I felt that, without any objective measurement, that sometimes he struggled a bit more in the second part of the game, especially in the last 20 minutes, to create the movement he can. I put that down to an adaptation period. It was not so much physically – that didn’t drop so much – it just looked like he was a bit less sharp."

Related Story: 3 Reasons Mohamed Elneny Contract Matters

Maybe I’m reading too much into that, but the main point here is that the reason comes down to the big ‘a’ word that I hate to use – acclimation.

More from Pain in the Arsenal

• 3 observations from Arsenal’s victory at Goodison Park
• 3 standout players from 1-0 victory over Everton
• 3 positives & negatives from Goodison Park victory
• Arsenal vs PSV preview: Prediction, team news & lineups
• 3 talking points from Arsenal’s victory at Goodison Park

Everyone acclimates differently. There’s no hiding that. It’s part of changing leagues and changing teams. But Wenger’s handling of different acclimation periods defies any sort of rhyme or reason. I would put Lacazette’s arrival in the same echelon as Alexis’s and Mesut Ozil’s.

Perhaps my memory is failing me, but even when Ozil and Alexis struggled, Wenger never took them off on account of acclimation. In fact, there were times where I would be begging for them to be taken off, even in recent years, and he still wouldn’t.

Yet Lacazette’s acclimation was worthy of him being consistently taken off every single match. I don’t think what Wenger has said makes the handing of the situation any clearer. In fact, I know it doesn’t, because Lacazette’s “acclimation: was a hoax.

He didn’t struggle until he realized that he was being consistently subbed off. That’s when the confidence problems started and that’s when he finally started snagging some full matches, but the damage was done.

It’s not even that he was being subbed, either. It’s that there was never any plan behind it. There were matches – Stoke City for instance – where he looked sharp and in tune, yet he was taken off early.

Next: Top 5 Summer Positions Of Need

This excuse doesn’t do it for me. I realize that there is no conspiracy here, but a more cynical person wouldn’t find it hard spinning it as such. This was all just handled so poorly.