Arsenal: Complete player rankings for the 2018/19 season

9. Sokratis

I know I wasn’t alone in not being all that excited by our signing of Sokratis this past summer. Arsenal needed massive defensive help, and one 30-year-old who has lost his starting job at Dortmund didn’t stand out as the guy we needed.

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But he was. He really was. His biggest flaw was that there was only one of him, and Arsenal needed more than that, particularly after Holding went down for the year.

For his part, though, Sokratis was a tremendous asset to the team. He played in a way that we needed him to play, absorbing pressure and not standing for any nonsense. If nonsense got to close, he would simply wrestle it to the ground. Which, more times than not, was worth the accompanying yellow card.

It’s impossible to deny that when paired with Laurent Koscielny, this defense actually looked formidable, and that is not a word I would often use to describe our back line.

Now he’s in charge of making sure that Konstantinos Mavropanos develops into Sokratis 2.0, because I don’t know about you, but I want some more of it.

Andy (10), Josh (8)

No. 8 is coming up next.