The Arsenal and Germany international star may have been getting a large amount of stick and criticism from the Arsenal fans and the football press of late, especially after his anonymous and ineffective showing in the Champions League defeat away to Bayern Munich this week, but that does not all of a sudden mean that Mesut Ozil is a bad football player.
He has not been playing well but that is form and you know what they say about form being temporary and class being permanent. One man who is certainly not forgetting just how much ability and impact the German play maker can have is the manager of our FA cup opponents Sutton United.
As reported by the Evening Standard this week, Paul Doswell has declared that his hopes of guiding the National League team to one of the biggest ever upsets in the tournament’s long history will be almost zero if Arsene Wenger decides to name his strongest Arsenal XI on Monday evening.
Doswell specifically mentions Ozil alongside Alexis Sanchez as the two outstanding stars in the squad of the Gunners, and that is something that we all know even though many of us have vented our frustration at the languid looking midfield star at times.
Doswell said, “There’s two ways of looking at it. You either get the likes of Ozil and Sanchez and Giroud — and you can just keep naming them — in which case we would lose the game comfortably but the lads would get the experience of having played a Premier League giant.
“If you see Ozil and Sanchez on the team sheet our chance doesn’t come beyond nought. Or you go the other way and you play a team of under-23s that are still internationals mixed in with one or two of their squad players, and that gives us that one percent chance that we’d be after.”
Do you think Wenger will start with his best side? Will that side include Ozil? Will that prove Doswell right about Sutton’s chances of a giant killing?
Bob.