Arsenal: None of this Mesut Ozil business sounds good

Arsenal were notably without struggling Mesut Ozil against West Ham due to sickness, but it doesn’t sound like he was sick at all.

Arsenal tallied their first win of the season in matchweek three and while the scoreline was a bit of a fluffy one, it wasn’t as convincing as those numbers hint at. But the job is done, three points are in the book, on to the next one.

Rewind a bit. Mesut Ozil got sick. Again. This is the seventh time – seventh! – that Ozil has missed a match due to a sudden and mysterious illness that might be back problems according to his agent, but might not be.

Under Arsene Wenger, there was never any room in the boss’s words for conspiracy theories, except of course for the time he left the team hotel the morning of the match at Burnley and even Wenger was left admitting his ignorance.

That had been the standout ‘wtf’ moment with Ozil and his mystery illnesses, but the latest one may take the cake.

After struggling in his opening two matches, Ozil missed out against West Ham because of these same illnesses that no one ever bothers to explain. If something is seriously wrong, or actually wrong, then I regret saying any of this, but no one has every clarified anything.

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This time around, though, Unai Emery was left to explain and he left a lot of room for question. Here’s what Emery had to say, as quoted by the Sun:

"I spoke with him about things tactically for this match and the last match. And he said he was sick. On Friday, after my conversation on Thursday, he continued to stay off sick. We spoke with the doctor and decided it was better for him to stay at home. If he felt better on Saturday, he should come."

Emery isn’t trying to instigate anything, obviously, and he did go on to say that his own English wasn’t that good, but I mean, how long are we supposed to keep believing that these sicknesses are an actual thing when nothing is ever said about them and no one else is sick. Or, when they are, we are told ‘well, it’s food poisoning.’

Great. I get that. Food poisoning sucks.

This doesn’t sound at all like that. This sounds like Ozil didn’t like how things were going to he decided to take some time to himself. But that’s as much speculation as I want to throw out there. I just don’t like it.