Arsenal: Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is what he is, for better or worse

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang brought Arsenal back to within a goal against United, but all things considered, his overall performance was far from the usual.

Arsenal showed some fight when they clawed back from a two-goal deficit against Manchester United, and it was courtesy of a Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang goal. The Gabonese forward has been at or near the top of the Premier League goal-scoring chart all year, and that isn’t likely to change.

Which is why I’m even now questioning why I set out to write this article in the first place. For years, we asked for a guy that could just score goals. We have that now. And yet, that is the problem.

Because all that Aubameyang does – literally, all – is score goals. He doesn’t do much of anything else, at least not consistently. He has matches like against Chelsea where he is a master tackler, but I doubt we’ll ever see that again. He has matches where he is remarkably creative, but few and far between.

Aubameyang is a luxury player. He is another Mesut Ozil, but with a different specific skill set, a set that makes him more valuable than Ozil, because it produces hard results. Even if those results are even a bit hit-and-miss at times.

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This is just who Aubameyang is, and there is nothing we can do about it. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s bad, it’s pretty terrible. But it’s not even that he’s bad, it’s that he often goes anonymous, or ghosts the game. Against United, apart from the goal, what did he actually do? And sometimes he doesn’t even have a goal to bail him out.

I even explored if this was a good thing, this “less of Aubameyang is good” in an attempt to justify the matches where I would prefer Olivier Giroud up front to him. But can you justify it? I don’t think so. He just is what he is, for better or worse.

And that’s when you have to ask yourself if that is acceptable. Because he isn’t going to change. He is making a lot of money, and he is scoring goals, so that’s the argument for making the money, but is he really more valuable than someone like Lacazette?

It’s not an easy discussion to have. Obviously we all love having him on the club, but there is a certain degree of realism required to accept who he is as a player. Because he isn’t a striker that can change the game itself.