Arsenal and Aaron Ramsey: Ray Parlour’s been right all along

Arsenal have a lot of talking heads orbiting them like a moon, but Ray Parlour has been spot on about Aaron Ramsey and Mesut Ozil this whole time.

There are some Arsenal fans out there that will tell you that it’s wrong to criticize the team, and that we should all support everyone, yippee. But for the record, being critical of a player is not a sign of not being supportive. It’s a sign of being practical.

Such goes the typical preamble before talking about Mesut Ozil, the man all fans love, but also the man who practical fans have been questioning for years. Myself included. At no point will I cast into doubt whether he is world class or not. He is. It’s all a matter of fit.

Aaron Ramsey, however, goes deeper than that. His heart and soul is with the club, he’s been hear for ten years, he works tirelessly, even when there isn’t a contract offer on the table, and all for what? To watch Ozil get preferential treatment over him.

Not a lot of people have been offering practical counsel during this entire sage, which really looked a lot like a simple choice between Ramsey and Ozil, but Ray Parlour, to his credit, has been.

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From the moment the season began, Parlour has been taking the critical road to Ozil (and before that, even). When Unai Emery initially benched Ozil, Parlour was in the new manager’s corner.

And then the impasse developed, where Ramsey’s contract offer was pulled off the table, guess who was there to point out the problem? Again, Ray Parlour, who said that Ramsey was paying the price for the Ozil “mistake,” meaning the massive new deal he got last January.

Now, after that brilliant Tottenham match, Parlour has said what I’m sure a lot of us are thinking (myself included) – that he’d rather have Ramsey than Ozil.

I get the hesitancy to boil it down to “this or that,” but isn’t that exactly what it has come down to? Only, with the new 3-4-3/3-5-2 formation seemingly wiping out the No. 10 position, I wonder if it isn’t too late for the club to reconsider and do exactly what Parlour has been suggesting – keep Ramsey (please!) and not Ozil (bummer, but we will survive).

The whole situation seems rather odd, given how jolly both Ramsey and Unai Emery were at the start of all of this. But it’s not to late to make things right.