Arsenal: Bit of weed wacking all this attack really needs

Arsenal have a superb attack on paper. Hard to ignore that. But if you want it to thrive, you have to hack away the weeds that are stealing the sunlight.

If you looked at Arsenal‘s attack on paper, you’d think that they’d be hammering home three goals a game on average. It’s riddled with superstars, all with a proven track record of scoring or creating goals. There’s no reason they should be stymied.

But think about it like a flower garden. Sure, the flowers can look beautiful, but if you’ve got weeds in there, it robs everything from the garden just by presence alone. And it steals nutrients and it just does all kinds of nasty things. Gotta Round-Up those muthas.

I’m not here to point fingers (except at Mesut Ozil) and say that this guy or that guy needs to be sold or exiled or anything like that. I’m mostly just here to say that there is no reason that our attack can’t thrive as is.

What we need is Mikel Arteta to fire up that weed whacker and just go to town, trimming the fat from the attack, re-arranging things, and figuring out where the few holes in that flower garden are, so that he can plant new flowers there.

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And it’s very likely that no new flowers are needed. It’s very likely that it’s just a bunch of annoying weeds robbing us of our inherent splendor. But we won’t know until we start clearing out the weeds.

That could mean a lot of things. It could mean changing the formation. Maybe we run with two strikers and ditch the No. 10.

Maybe we run with a bank of three central midfielders and ditch the No. 10.

Maybe we try anything that doesn’t involve fielding a No. 10.

Maybe we trust the guys we have to play their best positions (knowing that a No. 10 is not a position that we need anymore).

There are a lot of maybes. But that’s how weeds are. Weeds spring up where you least expect it, where you don’t want them, where they don’t belong. They just do weedy things. And right now, that’s the problem with the attack. Something is holding it down, tactically or personnel-wise, and it is Arteta’s job to figure out what it is so that this super star attack can do super star things just like they used to.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?