Arsenal: Surely the Granit Xhaka fans can see it now

Granit Xhaka had one of his worst performances in an Arsenal shirt in Sunday’s draw with Brighton. Surely even his biggest fans can now see his limitations.

As soon as Granit Xhaka faced up against Solly March, Arsenal were in trouble. Henrikh Mkhitaryan had, just moments earlier, misplaced a simple pass to feed overlapping full-back Stephan Lichtsteiner, leaving both ahead of the play and vastly out of position.

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This is the type of situation that every top team must face — the full-backs push high to provide width in the final third and sometimes a turnover is committed or forced and they are caught out of position, unable to track back into their defensive space. This exact scenario is why the defensive midfielder is so important.

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On Sunday, it was the job of Xhaka to fill the space of Lichtsteiner and deal with the growing threat that March dribbling forward posed. He was always struggling to close down the wide channel that March drove towards. But then he made matters worse by misreading the threat, taking a poor angle to close down the Brighton attacker in an attempt to go and win the ball, and opening up a wide channel around the outside.

Xhaka should have been more conservative in his defending — his overeagerness is a notorious weakness in his game — and looked to simply shepherd March wide and prevent a cross into the box, rather than try and win the ball. Xhaka was aggressive in his decision-making, dragged himself out of position, and then lacked the athleticism and speed to recover, first pulling the shoulder of March in a vain attempt to try and slow him down and then clipping his heel, conceding a clear penalty.

And this is the primary issue with Xhaka: he is not defensively astute, often losing concentration, not marking opponents or tracking runs, or making poor decisions and falling out of position as a result, and then he lacks the necessary quickness and athleticism to recover.

Some defensive players will make positional or mental errors, but they are blessed with the necessary speed to recover, Hector Bellerin being a prime example. Xhaka is not one of those players. As a result, he must have excellent defensive instincts to ensure that he is able to protect the back four. And he just doesn’t. He has proved it time and time again, and this was one of the most egregious instances.

This is the main limitation of Xhaka. He does have value. His passing — although not recently — helps dictate the tempo of the play and he provides a foundation for his attacking teammates to play off. But he also has serious limitations, most notably defensively, and they will always be there. They prevent him from being a top-tier central midfielder.

Even his biggest fans must concede the fact that his efficacy is limited because of the very limitations of his skill set. This was simply another example of his loose defending and lacking athleticism, and it goes to prove that he will never be good enough for a title-challenging Arsenal.