Arsenal: 3 improvements Alexandre Lacazette must make if he stays

1. Confidence

When we sold Olivier Giroud and brought in Alexandre Lacazette, little did we know we were selling a guy who struggled with confidence issues but was slowly overcoming it and replacing him with a guy who struggled with confidence issues and hadn’t started to overcome them yet. It was a pretty obvious switch by the frustrations that came along with.

Lacazette’s confidence issues are their own monster. He will go weeks without even looking like he’s going to score, he’ll hang his head, he’ll withdraw into a shell of himself, he won’t be able to touch the ball without it ruining an attacking play.

So many times those poor runs of confidence are undone with assistance from his pal Aubameyang, but that can’t always be the case. Lacazette is being asked to do a lot at Arsenal, sure, but it’s because he is capable of doing it if he could only stay in the right headspace.

Much like reliability, it’s hard to find a striker with no confidence problems. Impossible, really. But it has to start to look better than it is. That is, if he’s staying.