Final words on the Arsenal left back situation

for now at least :-)

I want to do one final post on Arsenal’s left-back situation (famous last words).

I have been pigeon-holed into being the Oleksandr Zincehnko defender but I think my actual position is much more nuanced. I am not blind and can see the issues with his game, I do also believe that he is generally a net positive for the team.

This doesn’t mean that he should always start or that he is above criticism. There are plenty of times where he has earned that but that is the same with all players. What makes me feel frustrated is that I think his positives are underrated and his negatives are overrated, and that there is a collective narrative that has built up that has made him into a scapegoat that is severely out of proportion to reality.

Measuring the actual impact of a single player is hard and is probably impossible with the current tools out our disposal. I think on/off stats are flawed (not enough subs and combination, too low scoring, too random to separate signal from noise) but as a very rough tool, I think it can be illuminating to see if broad strokes narratives hold up to scrutiny.

What I see here is that Arsenal are a very good team, the impact of the left back is probably smaller than most would expect.

Zinchenko has defensive flaws and increases the risk, with other teams this could be fatal but with an elite center-back pairing and Declan Rice the team can carry this and take advantage of his marauding.

Jakub Kiwior has flaws in possession and can be targeted by elite wingers. Arsenal have additional ball progressors that they can turn to compensate for this plus they still have elite defenders around him.

Takihero Tomiyasu is a more well-rounded blend perhaps of both. He still struggles as a ball progressor at times but is more comfortable inverting and has the benefit of being one of the more two-footed players in the game. He is perhaps the best one-on-one defender in the team. He can also benefit from others picking up the slack of squeezing the toothpaste knowing that the back door will be covered.

I wrote this after Arsenal’s win against Brighton:

So often last season Arsenal had just one way of playing and it was heavily dependent on having a few key players available to make it work. Zinchenko was one of those players; when he was out Arsenal’s ball progression and control suffered mightily. This year we have seen that but I think also an adaption with different ways to solve that problem with Jorgniho and White changing their roles and picking up the slack.

People will say that they are evolving away from him and I think that is partially correct, I think the team is adding resilience to be able to not be dependent on any single player and the team will still want to have his skillset but they won’t fall apart without him.

I think that this is still the main point. As Arsenal develop a squad that is deeper and can challenge on multiple fronts it is important to try and make sure that there are viable options in multiple spots. Arsenal have built this through versatile and unique players and will continue to do that as we move forward.

We don’t necessarily only want one team of 11 players that must play a certain way, we want a team that has options down to the 14, 15, and 16 players in the squad where if they play it isn’t because there is a crisis in the team. We want to play the ‘Arsenal Way’ but it should still be able to take the opponent into account to exploit their weaknesses and try and cover for their strengths.

This is in my view what we are seeing develop and there is a place for different roles in the team and it doesn’t need to be either or, and we need to move away from a set first eleven thinking as the team gets deeper. The left-back situation is just one of many that will hopefully develop all over the field.