Arsenal: Actually, Ramsey and Ozil have precious few similarities

Arsenal are losing Aaron Ramsey and keeping Mesut Ozil, but that has nothing to do with any perceived similarities between the two, because there aren’t many.

It’s international break, which means that the slow news days are in full swing, and as such, I find myself nitpicking everything that anyone has to say about Arsenal. This time, my beef comes to us from Stewart Robson, who believes that the Gunners are “rightly” letting Aaron Ramsey go because he shares too many similarities with Mesut Ozil.

This isn’t me nitpicking, this is me being emphatic – this assessment is dead wrong. Robson claims that the two of these players are luxury players, but he’s only got half of that right. Ozil is a luxury player through and through – so is Aubameyang.

But Ramsey? No. Ramsey is not a luxury player. He is attack-minded, and definitely favors getting forward more than he does staying at home, but it’s those runs that make him so special.

A luxury player is someone who you have around to do every specific things, who doesn’t contribute in a lot of other ways, and who needs a lot of things to be going right around him in order to be useful.

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That’s Ozil.

That could not be further from Ramsey. Ramsey is the kind of guy who will take charge of a game when things aren’t going well. He will take then ball into the teeth of the defense, force the issue, and do all the things a self-starter would do.

Ozil doesn’t do that. Because Ozil is a luxury player. Ramsey isn’t.

Ramsey has always boasted solid ball-recovery numbers, no matter if he was playing in the holding midfield two, as a No. 10 or forced out on the right wing. He is an engine, which almost exclusively eliminated the “luxury player” tag. He is always tracking up and down the pitch in pursuit of perfection and you can’t say that about Ozil (though he’s done more of it lately).

I’m not saying any of this to slight Ozil. He is what he is. I’m saying this to slight Robson. That isn’t why Ramsey is being done away with. The only similarity the two share is they play the same position and like to attack. It doesn’t go any farther than that.

In a quest for a satisfying reason pertaining to why Ramsey is being thrown away, Robson’s theory doesn’t do the trick.