Arsenal: The one man who could possibly replace Sokratis

Arsenal will be without Sokratis for a month at least. So that’s where we are right now. There’s maybe one potential help, though.

If you would have asked any Arsenal fan about a week or so ago what the worst possible thing to happen to the club right now would be, I would reckon that there is an 80% chance they would say “lose Sokratis to injury.”

It’s become obvious how important Sokratis is to the club, and you could see it in a microcosm against Manchester United. For 20 minutes, nothing bad happened. The partnership was alive and well. Sokratis and Laurent Koscielny were carrying on right where they left off.

Sokratis goes out in the 20th minute, 15 minutes later, we are 2-0 down. That’s no coincidence. And what happens next will either be remarkably unsurprising, or a miracle.

Because what that’s what we are currently up against. The Laurent Koscielny injury is bad enough, but it is Sokratis who clearly tied this defense together. Even when he was paired with Mustafi, there was hope, plenty of it.

Not like when Koscielny and Mustafi were partnering over the years. There wasn’t much hope there.

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Sokratis can’t be replaced in the starting XI. The best possible option we have is Konstantinos Mavropanos, who carries that same mentality that Sokratis does, this “get the hell away from me” mentality that you love to see out of a defender, especially one at Arsenal, where we’ve been riddled with a bizarre attraction to defenders who dabble in too much nonsense.

Replacing Sokratis isn’t something you just do, because as we’ve seen all year, when he isn’t in the mix, it’s far worse than when he is.

But Mavropanos hasn’t been in the mix all year, so we don’t yet know if he can be a solution or not. It may be grasping at straws, since we don’t actually know what will come of it, but it’s better than grasping at Mustafi, no?

It’s not going to be a fun stretch, with Sokratis out, but at least we can figure out what other resources we have before we go diving into the unfriendly world of the transfer market.

Frankly, there is no other option unless we start turning towards our aging fullbacks as plausible solutions ahead of a young man who is going to be desperate to prove himself beyond the few matches we saw at the end of last year. I know my choice.