Arsenal: Desperation Denis Suarez never even got a chance to exist

Arsenal signed Deni Suarez seemingly in desperation, but whatever mode that was going to evoke from him is likely null and void by now.

When Arsenal first signed Denis Suarez, it felt like a pure desperation move – not as a discredit to the player, but as a signal to the state of the club. Chances were next to impossible to come by. Mesut Ozil, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Alex Iwobi were not creating, and with how little Aaron Ramsey was featuring, he barely got a chance.

Suarez was supposed to step in and fix all of that, but as soon as he arrived, Mkhitaryan turned up the jets and Ozil came back into the fray. Which was a good thing, because seeing Suarez early on, it was clear that he hadn’t quite anticipated how rough the Premier League was going to be to his La Liga self.

As such, the development of Suarez has been slow going, and that might be frustrating to some, but we don’t actually know what might have happened had he been called on in desperation to fix us.

What if Mkhitaryan or Ozil hadn’t figured things out, and the drought continued? Then the whole “we can’t do worse than Suarez” argument would have held water and, chances are he would have been forced into the fire.

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He would have had to learn quickly, weathering some rough outings in the hopes of finding glimpses of sunlight. And there’s no telling how that might have turned out. Maybe he could have latched onto some good form, maybe he’d have failed.

The point is, Desperation Denis never had to be the superhero that the Gunners might have needed. Instead, we are getting Developmental Denis – a slow, deliberate build-up towards the promised land of first-team relevance.

I was surprised to see him come on against Manchester United, but it was clear that the slow, deliberate build up towards the promised land of first-team relevance is headed in the right direction. he didn’t shy from the physicality of the match, he didn’t get pushed around. He fit in. He looked like he belonged, like he was a… relevant member of the first-team.

That’s all we can really ask for now, isn’t it? The circumstances of his arrival changed the minute he arrived. Now all we can do is sit and wait to see how he can impact the club in small batches. And I’m okay with that.