Arsenal: Is this the Sokratis that we were promised?

Arsenal’s defense is a problem all over again, but it’s not in the usual, predictable way. And it may be getting better if Sokratis has found himself.

If anyone cares to recall, I wasn’t exactly high on the idea of Sokratis coming to Arsenal. If we were going to spend on defense, I wanted it to be someone dynamically better than what we already had, and Sokratis wasn’t that. Not by my estimation.

Borussia Dortmund were done with him, they were moving on, and to do that, they had to offload their own dead weight, which became our starting centerback. And, in response, Calum Chambers was even loaned out to pave the way for him.

My optimism regarding Sokratis was given a bit of a boost when he said, prior to the season, that he was going to bring the old-school, hard-nosed defending that the Gunners have been so sorely missing.

He claimed to be a defender first, someone who would take his responsibilities seriously. And given the mistakes we saw last year from our unfortunate centerback pairing, that was exactly what we wanted to hear.

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Sokratis wasn’t bad against Manchester City and he wasn’t bad against Chelsea. ‘Not bad’ isn’t that exciting, needless to say, but it also isn’t bad. Which is something we should be thankful for.

Against West Ham, Sokratis began as more of the same. He was average. He made one mistake, but his only error was that he wasn’t acrobatic enough. Hard to fault him for that.

In the last twenty minutes or so, though, with a lead to protect and plenty of attack from the Hammers to deal with, Sokratis was exactly as he said he was going to be. He was a no-nonsense, menace for the opposing attack. He used his body to disrupt anyone who got to close and he even picked up a yellow card for an intelligent hard foul to stop a counter attack.

And through that bit, he looked confident, he looked competent, and he looked reliable.

This may very well be the start of the Sokratis we were promised by his own words. It was always going to take time for him to settle in, but with the monkey off the team’s collective back, Sokratis may find it in his arsenal to be a much more reliable force from here on out.

He’s pairing pretty well with Shkodran Mustafi too. If they can find the slightest protection around them, they could end up a reliable duo.