Arsenal: Alex Iwobi does, and Alex Iwobi doesn’t

Arsenal’s win over Huddersfield allowed Alex Iwobi to do all the things we love and combine it with all the things he doesn’t do, that we’d wish he did.

Arsenal faced a tough and determined Huddersfield at their home, and their fans were rowdy, to say the least. For a full 90 minutes, the Terriers kept the fight up, determined to establish some hope fo staying in the Premier League.

And the Gunners had their own fighters. Namely, Alex Iwobi, the long-debated young man who has made a career of doing and not doing, hitting and missing, unable to establish any consistency.

For 45 minutes, the entirety of the first half, Alex Iwobi was a game changer. Both he and Henrikh Mkhitaryan were the drive behind this match, but it was Iwobi’s finish for the first goal that gave the Gunners that important first step.

He continued to prove himself a deadly attacker in that first half, doing all the things we love about him – driving, dribbling, dipping and duping. He even would have scored a second beautiful volley too, had it not been waved off for offside.

It was the Iwobi we’ve been dying to see, with sprinkles of the Iwobi that we struggle with.

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The second half was a different story. Not just for Iwobi but for the team in general, as they struggled to keep up against the biting Terriers, who were desperate just to score a goal.

In this second half, Iwobi and the rest of the Arsenal attack faded. And with it, so too did the sharpness and out came the Iwobi that doesn’t quite know what to do around the goal. He took one really terrible shot and had another cross that looked like it might have wanted to be a shot, and these were on counter attacks that could have put the match away once and for all.

This man, who had done so well to serve as the spearpoint of the attack in the first half, now looked like a blunt instrument in the second half. He gave the ball away ten times overall, and yes, I prefer someone to lose the ball in the attempts to make something happen than not to try at all. But Iwobi was here to create chances and inspire with his feet, and he only combined for three dribbles and chances created. Not sure that balances out with ten times surrendering the ball.

The ongoing enigma of Iwobi was not solved by his performance against Huddersfield. It was simply prolonged. We saw the things we’ve seen before, both on the good and bad side of the spectrum.

It was good, overall. But it could have been great. Frankly, I for one needed it to be great, since the potential was there for it to be so. The fact that he took the makings of a tremendous individual performances and settled with a good one, well, that’s textbook Iwobi.