Arsenal: Shkodran Mustafi solidification the best possible outcome

Arsenal’s defense is undergoing some changes, and those changes will continue to evolve, but if Skodran Mustafi can be maximized – game over.

Arsenal‘s first major preseason match gave us a lot to talk about. Matched against Atletico Madrid, the Gunners fell in penalties, but they played the Spanish side as equals for the entire experimental match.

In the process, we got to see a lot of what Unai Emery will hope to do throughout the course of the season and we got to see what improvements this side will hope to make in the disaster area last year – the defense.

It was a hit and miss. Literally. Rob Holding was pretty awful throughout, in addition to giving up the one goal that the Spanish side scored. This compiles on the ongoing derailing that Holding seems to be stuck on.

But opposite him, Shkodran Mustafi was as stoic as can be. Which, as I will always say, doesn’t get much better. An in-form Mustafi is about as good as you can get from a defensive situation. And I mean that. He wasn’t 35m by mistake. He was 35m because he has the ability to be a top-tier defender.

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The problem has never been his upward mobility. The problem has been consistency. But that problem was only at a tipping point last season. His first year, even with the leeway given him, he was still in pretty good standing. I mean, hell, the guy went on a 19-match unbeaten run to start his career at the Emirates.

That’s pretty impressive.

Finding that Mustafi, the one that doesn’t mentally check out of games, and solidifying it as the norm, that is what is going to fix this defense in the long-term. As it stands, there are so many questions marks riddling the options back there. I wouldn’t say there is a single guy who we can point to and say that we 100% trust them.

That should be a goal. To emerge from this season with not one, but two guys that you can either say that about, or are getting close to saying that about.

Mustafi laid down a fantastic marker in his first opportunity to do so. Now we just have to see him do that for, what, three, four months in a row before we truly start to trust him?