Arsenal: Henrikh Mkhitaryan can see what happened to Mesut Ozil

Arsenal will be welcoming Henrikh Mkhitaryan back to the fold soon, and if he needed any extra reason to hit the ground running, he needn’t look far.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan was just as big of a capture for Arsenal as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang when it all went down last summer, but unlike Aubameyang, Mkhitaryan struggled to find his consistency. Still, bouts of brilliance reminded us of what he was capable of.

I really expected him to thrive under Unai Emery, but it turned out that he was in a similar boat as many other Wenger-era players. He just couldn’t settle.

Then things finally get good and he gets hurt and faces two months out. But it’s over now! And he’s coming back, stronger than ever before, and with the summer fast approaching, he will be pretty pumped to establish himself as an important member of this club.

But… if the injury and the looming transfer window isn’t enough, he need only look to Mesut Ozil, his supposed fellow member of the “Fab Four” and whatever they had intended on becoming.

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Ozil has been the showcase of what Unai Emery is capable of. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. It has looked bad at times, no doubt. I still wonder if Ozil can really be so bad that he couldn’t help our chance creation department at all.

But Emery knows his crew, and if he believes that Ozil isn’t good enough, so he’s been sitting him as reliably as can be.

Mkhitayran has seen all of that. He knows that, whatever volatility he felt before, is doubly so now. He is going to have his chance to be a solution, because Lord knows we need a good creator, one that can be somewhat competent. But he is also going to know that if he doesn’t produce, he will be Ozil-ed out of the club, frozen on the bench, and someone else will get a go.

I have to believe that Denis Suarez shook the creative midfielders up a bit, perhaps made them aware of their own diminishing shelf life. Every player handles that differently, but it would be awfully convenient if Mkhitaryan could just be himself again and be the creative force that we signed him on to be.

Of course, if not, the summer transfer window is indeed not far away, and we can bid adieu to our dreams of the Fab Four.