Arsenal: Sead Kolasinac just needs someone to match his mind

Sead Kolasinac is a monster presence for Arsenal, but his numbers paint him as average. He just needs someone to get on his wavelength, that’s all.

I always love when a player that has been underrated for awhile starts to break out of the background and become a primary player at Arsenal. Sead Kolasinac is currently in that state. He’s been a bit of a peripheral figure, good for specific purposes, but the more he plays, the more he delivers.

Now the problem isn’t so much his ability to deliver, but his teammates abilities to anticipate what he is going to do. Because when you get down to it, there is no conceivable reason why Kolasinac should only have five assists. There’s no reason why he should only be completing 0.6 crosses per 90 minutes, or creating 0.4 chances via crosses per match.

Kolasinac is another one of those guys, like Alexandre Lacazette, who you can’t judge by numbers alone, because you’d never get a good picture of the player. Lacazette isn’t going to score 30 goals, but he might be involved in 30.

Same goes with Kolasinac, although even more abstract. Take the match against Manchester United as a toke example. According to the numbers, he was pretty unspectacular. He only completed one of three crosses and created zero chances.

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But watch the match and you will see threat after threat sizzling in off the thundering left foot of the Bosnian.

The problem is that no one is, as of yet, matching Kolasinac’s wavelength. So when that cross goes sizzling through the box, mere inches away from the keeper, and no one touches it until it clears everyone, through to the other side of the box, Kolasinac gets nothing on the stat sheet to vindicate that it was a deadly ball.

A lot of this comes down to target men. Having both Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in the box should double Kolasinac’s odds of finding a friendly foot to deflect the ball home, but he’s often so direct and straightforward, with so little deliberation, that not even two world class strikers can anticipate.

In time, however, this should start to amend itself. As attackers start to get a beat on Kolasinac’s deadly precision, those balls will start turning into the back of the net, and that’s when the Bosnian will see his assists ballooning to 10… 15?

The sky is the limit when you play like Kolasinac, where the basis of his game is directness and ferocity. He attacks before anyone can think to defend. That’s a good problem to have,