Arsenal: Rob Holding is who we’ve been looking for

Arsenal have been looking for defensive answers for years now, but it’s looking like Rob Holding may be the culmination of failed searches.

As was overstated before the match, a lot was going to be known about the state of this Arsenal club and all of its individual parties judging by how well they held up against Liverpool, who are favorites to challenge Manchester City for the title.

There should be no doubt now. None whatsoever. The Gunners are the real deal. Unai Emery has put the pieces together remarkably quickly and, speaking of individual pieces, Rob Holding is the real deal too. In fact, I’d venture to say that he is exactly who the Gunners have been searching for for years.

The young Englishman came to the Emirates in an era where their defense was starting to fall apart. They just weren’t good anymore. But he was still too young and unproven to assert himself too much on the big picture.

What this club needed was someone who was smart off the ball, who was capable of tracking runs and who knew that the antithesis of good defense is nonsense.

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We needed someone who knew that it’s better to punt the ball away than keep hold of it and try to work some magic; someone who knew how to stay at home just as much as they knew how to press up the pitch with the ball when space allowed.

Shkodran Mustafi had the build of that defender, but he’s proven to be a wildcard. Calum Chambers was my bet, but for whatever reason, Unai Emery wanted to send him somewhere else to prove himself.

That left Rob Holding. Clearly Emery saw something in him and, the more the Liverpool match drove forward, the more I saw it too. Holding is exactly what we’ve wanted in a defender and he might had fallen right into place at long last at the Emirates in that 1-1 draw.

Holding’s intelligence off the ball was simply superb. I keep seeing him tracking runs in my mind and he couldn’t have done any better. It’s like he was magnetized to the attackers as they made those diagonal runs into the box.

It wasn’t a perfect match, but the point is that as he develops, those mistakes will weed themselves out and we will be left with a player who does exactly what we’ve wanted a defender to do for years – not screw up.