Arsenal: Sokratis raid bordering on shameful, yet necessary

Arsenal look to be tapping back into the Borussia Dortmund vein for another resource – Sokratis. It’s gotten a bit shameful, but should we care?

Arsenal’s defense is a joke. And not a well-kept joke, or a subtle, ‘had to be there to get it’ joke. It’s a raucous, everyone in the world is laughing, joke. Nothing ever seems to change, no matter who you put back there.

I have argued time and again that it isn’t the personnel that is the problem. When you have consummate professionals like Petr Cech and Laurent Koscielny making the most mistakes, there is something deeper, some philosophical derailing that is causing this defense to fail in every attempt to just be ‘acceptable’ rather than godawful,

However, for as much as I don’t think personnel is the biggest problem, I am always open to anew name entering into the fray, because the key here is finding a defensive pairing that works.

As such, in steps Sokratis, the big, bruising Greek defender, 29-years-old, veteran, and ready to stabilize a faulty defense. He has held down a fairly sturdy Borussia Dortmund back line for years and has shown, particularly this year, that sometimes a switch in defensive tactics is enough to settle thing down.

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That’s what happened at Dortmund this year, after a porous defense changed into something much more reliable, though still not perfect.

The problem, if there is one, is that it’s Dortmund. Again. Meaning that, if we do go after him, it will be our third direct capture from Dortmund this year, fourth if you count indirectly with Henrikh Mkhitaryan.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, other then the fact that it’s kind of embarrassing, almost, that we keep mining the same vein to fix our problems. It is a resource worth exploring, because Dortmund’s ability to churn out talent (thanks in large part to Sven Mislintat) is well known, but something about it just leaves me feeling a bit queasy.

But moving past that, it doesn’t matter. Because it is necessary. We desperately need to fix this defense, and the easiest way to make strides towards doing that is to introduce some new names to the fold. Sokratis plays a different style than our bumbling duo Koscielny and Shkodran Mustafi, meaning that if you stick him in next to either of these two, you get the desired skill combination.

At least on paper. Which does not guarantee anything, especially with the Gunners.

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There are so many other moving parts at play here, but right now, none of that matters. Because it’s all hands on deck to fix this defense.

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