Arsenal: Are we really talking about Granit Xhaka again?

Arsenal suffered a lapse from Granit Xhaka against Wolverhampton, but was otherwise positive around that moment. Yet you wouldn’t know if from the narrative.

Arsenal fans always need a scapegoat. They always need someone to point to and say “he’s the reason why these bad things happened.” For two years now, it has been Granit Xhaka. Everything is his fault, without exception.

This season has been his best season with the club, and it has given way to many fans forgetting to blame him for eating their homework, or hacking their thermostat to raise the temperature in their house, or not cooking the acorn squash all the way. But I knew it was only a matter of time before the narrative spun back against the Swiss international, and true to form, it took one mistake against Wolverhampton to do it.

Chris Wheatley at Goal.com, who is a fantastic writer and someone who I greatly respect, has taken to spinning that narrative back against Xhaka, asking just how long Unai Emery can afford to keep “carrying Granit Xhaka.”

From the moment I read the headline, I could feel the heat permeating off my face, and it wasn’t just the spicy Chinese food I was eating at the time (though that didn’t help).

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Carrying Granit Xhaka? That makes it sound like he’s a helpless baby in a papoose that they’re just hoping will turn into a functional adult at some point. We saw what happened when Xhaka came out of the starting XI in the early matches, with Torreira coming on in his stead. The hinge was gone. That swivel from defense to offense wasn’t there because neither Torreira nor Guendouzi knows how to be both productive and responsible with the ball just yet. Maitland-Niles is an interesting option, but we haven’t tried him yet and Ramsey is leaving, so why bother.

Also, why bother because Xhaka is a fantastic midfielder who made one mistake. Wheatley went on to cite that Xhaka lost the ball 29 times, which is more than anyone else, but that statistic isn’t cited, so I wonder if it comes down to incomplete passes, which, if that is the case, is incredibly unfair, seeing as how he touches the ball about 50 more times than anyone else and must therefore pass the ball much more as well.

So yeah, the guy who handles the ball and passes it so much more than anyone else is bound to lead the pack in incomplete passes. But he completed 90% of his passes, which is the important stat. He only had the ball taken from him one time, which pads his exceptional ball retention numbers this year.

I’m not making excuses for Xhaka’s mistake. That was awful, and it was absolutely a flashback to his old self. But that’s an ‘old self’ that we saw hasn’t appeared all season. He had just had a world-class performance against Liverpool and we are already back to saying he is a liability? It’s sickening.

Granit Xhaka is a necessity on this club, and if he is ever sold, I would love to see the stark realization hit when people realize that that crucial piece is missing.