Arsenal: How the hell has Aubameyang scored ten goals?

Arsenal managed to lose again in paltry fashion, but believe it or not, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is still in Golden Boot contention. How?

I spent a good couple minutes staring at Arsenal in 10th place in the Premier League table before clicking over to goal leaders, just to see what was up. I was actually surprised to see Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang sitting comfortably in third place, behind just Tammy Abraham and Jamie Vardy.

I don’t want to say Aubameyang doesn’t deserve to be there, but he doesn’t deserve to be there. Ten goals for a tenth place team? It’s madness.

Watching this team play lately, I honestly don’t know how it’s possible that we have someone who is in such a good statistical place. I mean, Vardy is powering Leicester in second place, Tammy Abraham is 10 points above us, then you have Aubameyang, with more goals than any City or Liverpool player.

It just doesn’t feel right. You look at when he scored, and seven of them came in the first seven matches of the season. Back when there was hope, and Unai Emery, and nobody was telling anybody to f*** off.

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Aubameyang then went six Premier League matches scoring just one goal, and that’s when things started to go bad. That’s when the season changed and it had barely even started. The dumpster fire was burning and Aubameyang had become a casual onlooker.

He nabbed the brace against Norwich City to get him to the ten he’s currently at, which is a grossly misleading figure. The fact is that Aubameyang is a product of his surroundings. He will be as good or as bad as the team around him. That’s why he nabbed seven early goals before getting just three in his next seven. It matches perfectly.

And with the state that the club is in, where they only manage about fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of quality play per match, I would be massively surprised if he manages to stay in that running much longer. There is no ball movement, there are no chances being created. There’s just no opportunity. Aubameyang can’t exist in those kinds of conditions. Not even close.

I’m open to surprises though, but I don’t expect any. He’s not a game changer. He’s much like Ozil, a luxury player who thrives in the good times and disappears in the bad. That being the case, and unless something changes, that Golden Boot will slip away.