Arsenal: Time to learn Unai Emery’s best team
Nacho Monreal, Hector Bellerin, Konstantinos Mavropanos, Mesut Ozil, Laurent Koscielny and Shkodran Mustafi all returned to training on Wednesday. It is time to learn Unai Emery’s best Arsenal team.
For the last two or three months, Arsenal have been limping by. In some case, quite literally. A myriad of injuries, stemming for long-term absences to short-term niggles, have left the squad severely depleted, forcing Unai Emery into some rather extensive selection gymnastics just to field a starting XI.
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Thankfully, however, those days are seemingly coming to an end. On Wednesday, the club announced that six players all returned to full training, some for the first time all season. Those players are: Nacho Monreal, Hector Bellerin, Konstantinos Mavropanos, Mesut Ozil, Laurent Koscielny and Shkodran Mustafi.
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That is a most welcome relief, especially with five of them being defenders, a position group that was particularly decimated during the Christmas period. And it also offers Emery selection flexibility that he has not all season.
At the start of the year, he was still learning about his new players, their relative strengths and weaknesses, what positions they could play and whether they fit into his style. By midseason and Emery’s ideas were beginning to come into formation, the injuries hit and whatever team he might have liked to have played was suddenly unavailable.
But now, just as the year begins to turn towards its second-half climax, Emery has the chance to combine both his ideas of what he sees is his best team and also an essentially fully fit squad. That will be enlightening.
If you were to ask for predictions of what Emery’s best XI might be, I am fairly sure you would probably get a different answer from everybody you asked. Even the formation is difficult to nail down, nevermind the players to fill it. What Emery wants to do with this squad is relatively unknown at this point in the year due to the vast array of absentees limiting his selections.
Now, however, those limitations have been rid of and Emery is pretty much free to pick whatever team he chooses. I doubt that we will get to see his best XI on Saturday against West Ham United. The six players that have just returned from injury may well not be risked so soon after their reintroduction, especially the likes of Mustafi and Mavropanos, the former having been in and out of the team with knocks for months and the latter not having played a single minute all season. But over the coming weeks, I do believe that we will see Emery’s plans for the future unfold.
Is Ozil a key player or is he now a secondary option? Who should the starting centre-half pairing be? What is the best formation, ranging from 3-4-3 right through to 4-4-2? Does Emery want both Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in the starting XI? Is Monreal anything more than a squad player?
As of writing, I believe that none of these questions have yet been comprehensively answered. But over the coming weeks, the answers that many fans strive for will be unveiled. This could be a very interesting period indeed.