Arsenal: Alexandre Lacazette needed that frustration

Arsenal spent three years trying to land Alexandre Lacazette, yet it wasn’t smooth sailing once they did. And he’s better off because of it.

I still wonder how things might have turned out differently if Arsenal had just forked out the money the first time they were interested in Alexandre Lacazette, rather than wait two more years to finally acquire him.

But we have him now, and he is settling in at last, and he has now spoken out about the dark ages when he wasn’t doing so well at the club, AKA last year.

Lacazette scored two minutes into his North London career. That sets the standard pretty high. And while 17 goals across all competitions is nothing to shirk at, it’s understandable that Lacazette was frustrated last year, we saw it on the pitch and, as fans, we felt it too.

There is always a curve that people have to face when they first come to the Premier League. There is no “smooth transition” for a player, no matter where they are coming from. Honestly, the EFL Championship may be the closest thing, if not just because of the similarities in playing style.

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Ligue 1 is not an easy place to transition from, and Lacazette felt that. He went through all the growing processes in one year, which, while frustrating, built him into the appreciative asset that he is today.

Think about what he went through since he arrived. He scored two minutes into his tenure at the Emirates. Then he went on one hell of a drought. Then he got hurt. Then he got replaced. Then the manager that bought him left. Then he started the following season on then bench.

That is a lot for a player to digest in a short amount of time, but when he retook the starting job, pushing Aubameyang out wide (which was helped on by their wonderful bromance), you could tell that there was something different about him. That he had started to grasp the stakes of the Premier League and what was expected of him.

That’s a remarkably fast transition with a ton of frustration, all helped on by facing the slew of typical obstacles that any given player will face in a career, let alone a year. And here he is, a top-class striker in the best league out there.

It was frustrating on both sides, but it couldn’t have worked out better any other way.