Enigma

Ozil has been hands down, the most skillful (not the best) player Arsenal has had in years.  Some of the best moments in the last unhappy Arsenal decade have come from him.  How did it come to this?  For him to become such a divisive figure?

At least that's what I thought, until I heard that 3/4 of respondents in a snap poll by Arsenal Vision said that, even knowing what we know now, they would still have taken the decision to sign him.  Even so I would imagine that among that group who would still rather sign him, he would be an incredible source of frustration, or a victim of managers/owners' whims - take your pick.  So he really pushes a lot of different buttons in people.

As with most things in life, like in how you score diving or gymnastics, throw out the extremes (the highest and lowest scores) and you probably get a good feel, or as objective a picture as you can get of a difficult subject.  In Ozil's case, I think the easiest thing to throw out is the idea that he has somehow conned the club into giving that massive contract and is now holding the club hostage by refusing to move.  

Well he has finally moved (or is about to).  Whether that's because the club found some way to pay off the remainder of the contract, or he decided to accept less than what he was entitled to, he made the move.  Sure he could have done what Kolasinac was said to have done, which is take a pay cut to get the loan move.  We should not expect Ozil to. Also the notion that he should not have put the club into such a position is unreasonable.  He is entitled to get the most he can out of a short career, and props to him for having a good agent.  No one held a gun to the club's head.  And they should honour the contract, which they would have done their sums for and knew that they could afford it.  Maybe there should be more weight put on performance in contracts, whether as a team or as individuals or both.

At the other extreme are the views of the fanboys.  They think the club's early season form was in the toilet because Ozil was left out of the playing squad altogether and that he is the main solution to our lack of creativity, which is a reductive argument.  There are many factors in our poor play and people's memories are selective.  When he did play last season under Arteta, he wasn't that great either.  His form has generally declined dramatically in the last year or two.

It is however difficult to analyse individual performance within the context of a team.  If I were generous, I could say that Arsenal (even Wenger) never got the best out of Ozil.  A writer (maybe Tim Stillman) gave what I thought was a very good description of Ozil - he said Ozil is the lubricant when you have a very good engine.  He isn't like the hub or heart of a team that you build around but more like that missing piece of a jigsaw to make it complete.  He cannot carry a team nor will it to victory.  My analogy?  He is like a very nice dressing that makes a great dish taste better.  He was no Vieira for sure.

The Premier League isn't for wallflowers and Vieira was a warrior, which you could never accuse Ozil of.  And in many respects, while he wasn't the hub or heart of the team, perhaps he best epitomised the lack of it in our team.  When the going got tough, he was never there.  And that is my main regret with him and the late-Wenger era.  So I don't think he quite deserves to be placed on that pedestal that many have.

But what he did was to give us many beautiful moments and memories, and in some ways it was a privilege to see an artist like him at work in the jersey.  Not every artist produces work consistently of a high standard and it would be absurd to expect them to.  But when they touch the heights of genius, we are brought almost to a different realm vicariously and for a brief moment, we breathe in and share that rarified air.