Arsenal: Why the hell wouldn’t you take Granit Xhaka to Vitoria?
By Josh Sippie
Unai Emery has decided not to take Granit Xhaka to Vitoria, leaving the now former Arsenal captain behind. What the hell is the point of any of this?
There was a lot of talk leading up to the Vitoria match that Unai Emery was ready to introduce Granit Xhaka to the Arsenal side and get him reacclimated to his central role at the club. Which sounded great, get him started away from home, in a seemingly easier match, and go from there.
It all looked great. And then the news hit that Unai Emery decided not to include Mesut Ozil or Granit Xhaka on the trip to Vitoria.
Mesut Ozil I kind of get. He’s played a lot over the past week. Give him a break. But Granit Xhaka is in desperate need to be eased back into the team. He may well have been ruined by the incident at Crystal Palace, but we won’t know until we get him back into the team, ready to carry on where he left off.
I don’t know what Unai Emery’s intentions are with Xhaka, but this throws a serious question mark over the whole ordeal and makes it feel like he’s withdrawn all support of his former captain.
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Next up after Vitoria is away at Leicester City, who are absolutely blazing this year. Sure, it’s an away game, which is cool and all, but that is a high intensity match that would not be a friendly one to reintroduce Xhaka too.
Then we have international break, which is also a nice time to recalibrate, but on returning, we then have two straight home matches. I don’t think reintroducing Xhaka at home is a good idea. It puts way too much faith in a fanbase that is undeserving of such faith.
The next good chance to get Xhaka back into the mix is away at Norwich, but that’s a month away.
We are not equipped to move this midfield forward without him right now. You can’t do to him what Emery did to Ozil, mostly because you can’t field two guys, neither of whom you want to play, so they just rot on the sidelines.
This is a huge missed opportunity. And despite all of this, I worry that maybe it wasn’t a conscious decision by Unai Emery to pass it up. Maybe it was just his spur of the moment managerial style that has suddenly come out this year.