Arsenal: Good thing we rented Denis Suarez then, huh?

Arsenal have been creating a lot of chances lately, and they haven’t needed Denis Suarez for a single moment of it. Good thing he’s a rental, huh?

For the second match in a row (and the second match in a week), Arsenal had one clear and obvious strength in the match – creating chances. They didn’t finish those chances particularly well and they didn’t defend particularly well (in the second match in particular), but they created so well behind the likes of Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Alex Iwobi, Mesut Ozil, Granit Xhaka, and their two strikers too.

Given that it is February, almost March, it’s a positive development that this has changed because, throughout the early stages of this calendar year, the story has been how starved the strikers have been, and how little support they’ve had.

That’s why we bought Denis Suarez a month ago. To fix the problem of creating chances. But, while the problem looks to have stalled and turned back the other way, Denis Suarez has had nothing to do with it, unless you want to count by some bizarre type of osmosis.

Let’s talk about the chance creators between BATE Borisov and Southampton (and don’t tell me that the quality of the opposition should mar the stats.

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In these past two matches, both Granit Xhaka and Alex Iwobi have created six chances each. Henrikh Mkhitaryan has created five. Mesut Ozil four. Sead Kolasinac two (he only played one match).

Denis Suarez? Zero. Mostly because he has played all of about 15 minutes in the span of two matches. So let it be said that I am not necessarily criticizing Denis Suarez so much as I am questioning why he’s here. Was he a panic buy? Er… a panic rent?

It sounded like, in the transfer window, that the Gunners were going to be forced into buying Suarez, as the reason that Ivan Perisic fell through was because they didn’t want to commit to buying him.

Suarez has been 100% irrelevant since arriving, and for that reason, I could not be more thankful for the fact that he is currently a rental and nothing more. He’s hardly played an hour of football, hasn’t had a single touch towards turning this club around and things have turned around in spite of him.

There’s still time to see where this is going, if anywhere, but the longer he doesn’t make an impact, the less likely I think it is that he will.