Time to drop Flamini by Blaz
Last year, when Arsenal signed Mathieu Flamini for free, I had mixed feelings. At first, I wasn’t all that happy about it, but it didn’t take long to feel good about it. It was good to have a non – compromising warrior in the middle of the field, someone that can tackle without hurting himself and someone to protect more fragile team members (remember the “I will blind you” quote). It was nice to have a tough tackler again.
This year though, he got even more chance. With Arteta being absent quite often, we started to rely more and more on him to keep together our midfield and control opponents offensive play. But he more or less failed miserably. All we need is to take a look at our last Premiership game and the goal we could have easily prevented.
If only Flamini kicked the ball anywhere or stayed on his feet. Yes it might as well be a foul, but he had all the time in the world to do something with the ball. If for this goal he has an excuse (though a weak one), there were other ones which he more or less enabled for our rivals to score against us. All we need is to look at the Tottenham game. So, someone who is supposed to support our back four and be the link between them and midfield and, even more importantly, prevent the other team from scoring, is basically giving opponents balls, goals and points. I feel we would get more coverage with playing Wilshire-Ramsey-Ozil/Cazorla in the middle, it certainly couldn’t be worse!
The fact is Flamini came for free and will leave also for free and he isn’t one of the higher paid players, but I for one can’t wait for him to be benched on a permanent basis.
Well that’s what I think!
Blaž from Ljubljana