Arsenal: Are we winding up Henrikh Mkhitaryan now?

Arsenal were getting such good production out of Henrikh Mkhitaryan, and now he’s gone and disappeared. Are they just winding him up?

If there is one thing Unai Emery does right, it is taking each match in isolation. He plays to Arsenal‘s strengths in any given game to the point of it being damn near unpredictable. It was surprising to see him utilize the same formation two matches in a row against Manchester United and Rennes, for instance.

The oddest thing is that the formation he duplicated, the 3-5-1-2, is not a friendly formation to some of Emery’s clear favorites. He is always going to prefer the industrious players to the specialized ones, and thus he has taken a liking to Alex Iwobi, but he has also been quick to hand Henrikh Mkhitaryan opportunities, simply because of his style.

It wasn’t paying dividends until very recently, when Mkhitaryan all of a sudden snapped into gear with four matches in a row of pure brilliance.

Then came Rennes, then he got hurt, then the 3-5-1-2 took over, and my only question is, how can a player go from that influential to out of the starting XI, all in just a week?

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The answer is simple – Unai Emery. And I mean that in the best way possible. Emery isn’t the kind of guy who sticks with a formula until it breaks. He is the kind of guy who is going to preemptively break a formula just so that no one can get too cozy in whatever role they were playing.

I don’t think this is what was intentionally done to Mkhitaryan. After all, he did get hurt, and then the replacement formation did so well that Emery stuck with it, and then it did well again. All the while, there just isn’t room for Mkhitaryan in what is currently working.

It’s a bummer, because he was doing so well, but all it’s really doing is winding him up for when Emery inevitably changes the formula in the near future. Which you can expect like… next time out against Wolverhampton, where he’ll likely get out of the back three, given that it is an away match, and focus more on control.

That way, Mkhitaryan knows what’s at stake. No one knows if they’ll be playing the next match or not, so might as well do the absolute best they can when the chance is there before them.