Arsenal: Alexandre Lacazette worth what needs giving up

Arsenal need to accept certain facts about their current state, and that means that Alexandre Lacazette starts no matter what, got it?

On the surface, every decision that Unai Emery is making regards to Alexandre Lacazette is the correct one. For the most part, anyway. He is trying to make Arsenal a functional all-around football club by piling the midfield or augmenting the defense and not overloading the attack.

That’s all well and good. It’s sensible. But it’s also a bit near-sighted, isn’t it? Because the Gunners are not a functional all-around football club. They don’t have a defense, and in turn, that saps the midfield, and the attack gets isolated.

This is what happens when you trust inadequate players to cover for massive injuries and inherent deficiencies within the club.

So how do you counteract that? By taking the one arena that you excel at and letting it overload the rest of the squad.

Even before the season started, we all knew what the focal point of this club was – it was the attack, hands down, no questions asked. Any attack with £100m+ worth of strikers is going to live or die by their ability to score goals.

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When put together, Lacazette and Aubameyang are unstoppable. Plain and simple. When put together in any combination of any formation, this defense is like a diet too high in fiber. Anything just passes right through them. There is no way around that with the personnel available.

So the logical solution isn’t to keep investing in the inadequacies of the defense, the solution is to let them be inadequate, and invest in the attack to compensate. Against Liverpool, for instance, Emery focused on beefing up the midfield in the hopes that they could match the precision of Liverpool.

But that was never going to happen. It would have made more sense to overload the attack and try our damndest to keep pace with that opposing attack.

With only eleven guys on the pitch, there are al ways going to be sacrifices made in order to start two strikers. But whatever we are losing by putting Lacazette in the starting XI as a second striker, is made up for by what he then provides the team. There is no doubt about it.

Trust in what works and, until you can fix it, accept what doesn’t work. Lacazette works, so let him do his work. He hasn’t played the full 90 in nearly two months. That has to stop.