Arsenal summer signing’s nightmare continues vs Brentford as Carragher shamed
“Prioritising signing midfielder Mikel Merino ahead of another attacker last summer looks like a mistake. Merino is not a game-changer.”
The immortal words of Jamie Carragher in January when he cited the Spain international’s signing as the reason Arsenal “cannot win the title”.
He was right in so far as Arsenal failed to catch Liverpool last season and are now big favourites to win the Premier League this term having followed his (and everyone else’s) counsel by adding a new striker to their roster.
But maybe because the threat to his place in the team has pushed him to greater heights, or the general improvement of the team a year further on in the Mikel Arteta ‘project’ is aiding him in his contributions, or simply because he’s more comfortable having taken time to adapt, it’s Merino who’s turned into the striker Arsenal always needed, not Viktor Gyokeres, who will have watched on in anguish from the Gunners bench at the Emirates.
Wayne Rooney was impressed when he was drafted into the No.9 position last season.
“I think he’s [Merino] been fantastic, maybe a little bit disrespected as well because there’s been a lot of talk about as well Arsenal playing without a number nine,” Rooney said before Arsenal’s Champions League semi-final first leg against Paris Saint-Germain in April.
“But he stepped into that role, he’s been incredible and I know how difficult it is as well to go from eight or ten and go and play as a number nine.
“It’s a real change of mindset, your whole game changes and you have to play a different way but I think he’s been incredible and scored some really important goals.”
After his equaliser at Stamford Bridge on Sunday he scored the opener against Brentford to make it four goals and two assists in six starts as centre-forward this season. And it was a ‘proper striker’s’ goal.
Noni Madueke flicked the ball beautifully for Ben White, who delivered into ‘the area where a striker should be’, and there Merino was. Having stayed out of the eye-line of the Brentford defenders he made his dart in front of Ethan Pinnock at the perfect moment to steal in ahead of him and nod the ball past Caoimhin Kelleher.
With an uptick in Arsenal dominance this season, with teams more persistently looking to resist and counter-attack in order to get a result against them, Merino looks increasingly like the ideal striker for them.
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Gyokeres may very well have made the same move and scored here but he doesn’t have the sublime pass Merino played to assist Leandro Trossard vs Tottenham in his armoury. Nor can the £55m man often expect the oceans of space we saw him tear into for Sporting, bullying defenders before scoring what anyone would identify as the Gyokeres goal.
Arsenal’s path to 90 per cent of their victories will see them looking to prise open defences with smart, close-knit interplay on the edge of the box, which Merino is far more adept at being a key part of than Gyokeres, whose absence from the team happens to have coincided with a real upswing in fluency and the danger the Gunners have posed to opposition teams in open play. Strange, that.
They give Arteta different options and it will be a case of horses for courses. But the vast majority of the courses for Arsenal this season should see Merino out in front while Gyokeres watches from the Emirates stables.
