Player Focus: Mesut Özil Working Hard to Make Arsenal Time a Success

There’s something about languid players that seems to divide opinion. Effort, industry, passion: these are the eternal virtues of English football, the sense that players need not merely to be trying but also have to be visibly trying so they end the game red-faced and sweat-soaked when perhaps a more restrained approach would have allowed them better to evaluate the game, to pick their passes with greater precision. And that’s why players like Michael Carrick, Dimitar Berbatov and Mesut Özil have always been treated with suspicion in England.

There’s a historical irony about the mentality that isn’t easy to unpick. When football began in the mid-nineteenth century, it was the game of the public schools and, although it soon became harnessed to the ideals of muscular Christianity, privileging effort for the sake of creating ‘better’ men, there must also have been those who followed the master of Balliol College, Benjamin Jowett, in seeing “effortless superiority”, the capacity to succeed without apparently expending any energy at all, as the ideal of the gentleman.

By the time football was professionalised in the 1880s, though, it had become predominantly a working-class sport, both in terms of those playing and watching. The muscular Christian ideal took hold, allied to the virtues of the factory floor, the shipyard or the mine: what was prized was hard work and reliability; if there was a place for individualism it was somewhere clearly defined, usually on the wings, safely away from the engine-room – a revealing metaphor. It was that mentality that created the culture of the modern game in England, and within those preconceptions that English football still exists.

The reputation of Özil at Arsenal traces a clear pattern. At first, fans were simply excited to have made a major signing. In highlights reels, Özil is a player who looks sensational, because a couple of dozen clips of precise passes to set up goals of deft finishes tells you nothing about what’s going on when his side doesn’t have the ball.

Özil began well. He set up a goal on his debut. He scored against Napoli and got two against Norwich. There were double-dotted vowels everywhere. And then Arsenal’s form wavered and people began to wonder whether he really put that much effort in. Against Bayern Munich he seemed even more lost than everybody else. When things go wrong, Özil’s shoulders seem to slump more than most, his naturally mournful face drawing attention to how difficult he’s finding it. He became a useful scapegoat.

And then the backlash against the backlash began. Games like Saturday help: a brilliant pass and a fine free-kick in the space of three minutes transformed a game that had been drifting into a certain Arsenal win. Even Özil’s critics acknowledge he has a capacity to change games, as 4 goals and 5 assists in 14 league starts this season attests.

Arsene Wenger on Saturday suggested that Özil, slowly, is adapting to the Premier League and it is true that his game has changed since last year. He dribbles more – 2.4 per game as opposed to 1.7 per game, and, while key passes have fallen from 2.9 per game to 2.5, crosses have gone up from 1.4 to 2 per game suggesting that is a facet of him playing more games in wide positions rather than him actually becoming less dangerous.

But what is really telling is his defensive work, with tackles, interceptions and fouls all up. There seems something slightly absurd about judging a player like Özil on how many tackles he makes, but the improvement in his figures at least suggests a greater effort and a greater energy, a willingness to try to fulfil his defensive contribution, although it’s perhaps troubling he is still not hitting the levels he achieved at Real Madrid. Perhaps the pace and combativeness of the Premier League does still trouble him.

Still what is important is that the trend is in the right direction – and his role at Arsenal, it should be noted, is more overtly attacking than it was at Real. Özil is adjusting and if that is allied to many more displays like Saturday’s, the doubts will melt away.

 

Do you think Özil is finally getting used to the Premier League? Let us know in the comments below