Arsenal: It’s high time to stand up for Shkodran Mustafi

Shkodran Mustafi has opened up about his time at Arsenal, and it’s clearly time to support this man much better than we’ve been doing.

Asking an Arsenal fan to support a player they don’t like is like asking a caterpillar to forget about being a butterfly. But I’m going to try regardless, because surely, deep in the pit of the shriveled heart of the average Arsenal fan, there is a bit of sensibility. A bit of compassion. And right now, Shkodran Mustafi is deserving.

Throughout the first two years of Shkodran Mustafi’s time at the club, I kept saying that, in time, he was going to pan out, and Mustafi has recently made the point that it’s not like we should be counting him out of the running now.

Mustafi had the misfortune of ranking second in Marca’s poll of worst players of the season, but Mustafi has flown to his own defense, saying that he was not deserving.

He reminded us of the 5-1 loss to Liverpool, where he was atrocious, before getting hurt again. He added the literal meaning to “adding insult to injury.”

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But according to Mustafi, he was already injured and only played that match because the club was desperate.

Mustafi has a point. For his first two years, he actually showed a ton of promise. He was undefeated in his first 19 matches. He showed athleticism like no centerback I’d seen before, but it all came to a head last year, when everything fell apart in such a way that even his smaller issues were exacerbated in such a way that it felt like he was a lost cause.

I gave up on defending Mustafi after last year, but we know how finicky confidence in this game can be. One thing goes wrong, you get attacked on Twitter, you’re already injured, and suddenly everything is spiraling out of control.

Many of you may not be interested, but it’s high time we defended Mustafi as one of our own. I can still think of some of his massive matches where he shut down Alvaro Morata and Diego Costa, or shut down Harry Kane. He is a man-marker extraordinaire that, when handed a task, usually carried it out. He was undone by a handful of awful mistakes, but if that all stems from that one Liverpool affair, then I’m one to extend an olive branch and see where he might be able to build from here.

Hell, he has yet to give up a goal this year. But maybe I’m getting soft…