Our player of the year last season and easily one of our biggest attacking threats in the team, Santi Cazorla enjoyed a wonderful start to his Premier League career achieving numbers Pires would have been proud of in goals and assists. This season, however, Santi doesn’t seem himself. He was arguably man of the match against Fulham in his favoured central role but since then has only really had good moments in a game and no good games overall apart from Liverpool.
Take Everton as an example, there were not many occasions where something he tried came off. His penetrative passes went straight to Everton players, his clever reverse passes were easily intercepted and cutting inside led to him getting crowded out and losing the ball. Worryingly this was not just a one off, he has had quite a few quiet games this season which has piled the pressure even more on Ozil and the clearly tired Giroud to produce some magic every game.
Santi’s best position is centrally and he was outstanding there against Fulham, but that was with the ever dangerous Walcott and a rampant Podolski running in behind the opposition. This provided him with more time and space on the ball to dictate play, which he did to tremendous effect. Since then Podolski & Walcott have hardly played due to injury which means Ozil in the central role has done remarkably well so far with no runners in behind to pick out and having barely been rested.
We saw how devastatingly good Ozil can be on his debut with Walcott at his best, Mesut could have had 3 assists in the first half to Walcott alone were it not for good goalkeeping/wasteful finishing. Since then we drooled over the prospect of adding Santi to our midfield to play with Ozil but it hasn’t lived up to expectation, unfortunately. The only performance I can personally recollect where they both played well would be Liverpool at home.
Fatigue should not really be a factor because he spent a month injured and normally comes off at 70 mins anyway, and him playing wide shouldn’t be an issue either because he played in both wide positions during his time at Villarreal and Malaga and played wide for us since the new year. I can only assume that he is trying to not overcrowd the central area because having Cazorla and Ozil in the same 10 meters makes it easy to defend against us and fails to stretch the opposition. In fairness to him he does put in more of a shift defensively as well but simply running a bit more doesn’t mean you are less effective in attack, look how hard Ronaldo and Suarez work.
I don’t think high expectation based on last year is a factor either because he’s actually had the spotlight taken off of him this season due to the emergence of Ramsey and Ozil’s arrival, so if anything he should have less pressure on his shoulders. I think the best thing for him now would be a few games on the bench purely for the team’s benefit. Rosicky-Ozil-Walcott behind Giroud is our best attack at the moment and soon enough we’ll have Podolski back fit to add another dimension to our game. I fear Ozil may burn out soon so after a few games on the bench playing Santi in the middle with Ozil on the bench may be the best thing we can do in the coming weeks.
We all love Santi and want him back to his best, but an off form Santi is still better than a lot of players when they’re playing well so lets be patient with him and keep singing his name. Maybe he is just a bit fatigued at the minute. Even though he isn’t playing that much, he might still be training hard and could be tired from that. I’m sure the staff at Arsenal will be able to help him with this. There are so many supplements out there, like gundry md total restore, that could help him to feel more energized. Maybe the staff will find him something like that to give him some more energy. He is still capable of producing match winning moments and I’m sure he will show it soon.
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Photo by Ronnie Macdonald