Viktor Gyokeres isn’t really here and his Arsenal prospects have never looked bleaker

Poor Viktor Gyokeres. Impossible not to feel for him on a night like this, so perfect a microcosm was it of his Arsenal career to date.

Before we get into the sympathy vote, let’s first note that he did little to help himself. There’s inevitably a chicken-and-egg quality to how ineffective Arsenal looked in Gyokeres’ hour on the pitch and how lethal they were for the final half-hour. Once Lille’s resistance was broken, Arsenal ended a night that was so full of frustration skipping merrily to the finish line and a 3-0 win that could have been even more emphatic.

Gyokeres is not blameless in this equation. Twelve touches, none of them shots or key passes, is a sorry state of affairs for any kind of line-leading striker in a home Champions League game that simply had to produce a routine home win.

Gyokeres had fewer touches than any other Arsenal player bar one. And Max Dowman has the reasonable excuse of not coming on until the 84th minute.

Dowman was also the only Arsenal player on the night with a pass-completion rate as low as Gyokeres. Again, though: Dowman completed three of four passes in a seven-minute cameo; Gyokeres six of eight in over an hour. Not all 75 per cent pass completion rates are created equal.

Ben White, who got 13 minutes, eased past Gyokeres’ numbers. Even David Raya saw more of the ball – and made better use of it – and Arsenal’s keeper spent the vast majority of this game in his slippers, curled up with a mug of cocoa and a good book.

It’s hard to call Gyokeres’ performance bad, as such, because for something to be bad it has to exist in some tangible form in the first place. Gyokeres’ problem all too often isn’t that he performs badly but that he can scarcely be said to perform at all.

Was he even here? We’d swear we saw more of him starting forlornly into the middle distance sat on the bench for the last half-hour contemplating the sheer futility of it all than we did of him during 63 minutes that every stat site we’ve checked are adamant he definitely spent on the pitch and nominally playing for Arsenal in a real football match that happened. We have to take their word for it.

Only slightly less guilty for Arsenal’s lack of potency for most of those 63 minutes was Noni Madueke. Out of favour for club and country this season, he seemed certain to suffer a similar opportunity-squandering night until, moments before he too made way alongside Gyokeres and an unusually subdued Mikel Merino, he teed up Jurrien Timber to expertly release all the pressure and tension that was building inside the Emirates with a touch-and-finish so worthy of an elite striker that it only left greater focus on poor old Viktor as he strode off.

Worse was to follow for Gyokeres as he sat on the bench to watch a now visibly relaxed and purring Arsenal side benefit further from the introduction of Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka and Kai Havertz.

Odegaard and Saka promptly combined to tee up Eberechi Eze for the second goal. Havertz and Saka then combined for the third.

If anything, for me, Clive, Arsenal almost summed up Gyokeres’ plight too well.

Had he played in the final half-hour here, there’s every chance he’d have got himself a goal. He’s not without his charms or merits. But Arsenal don’t need a Get In On The Act striker. They need a proactive striker who starts the act in the first place.

And that ain’t Gyokeres. Fletch and Coisty made the point on commentary during that frustrating first hour that this was a night crying out for Arsenal’s ‘clever players’. They were clearly referring to the trio who, at that time, were sat on the bench: Odegaard, Saka, Havertz.

But the reference to those not on the field as Arsenal’s clever players, while fair, also damned those on the pitch at that time.

Gyokeres is not one of Arsenal’s clever players. Arsenal, inevitably given their quality, are a team that spend a great deal of their time trying to unpick carefully organised and well-drilled low blocks. There was never any chance that Lille, coached by Davide ‘Son of Eyebrow’ Ancelotti would make life easy for Arsenal in that regard.

It was always going to be a night for lock-pickers, and so it ultimately proved. Gyokeres is a blunt instrument. It’s increasingly unclear what place there is for him, if any, in Mikel Arteta’s well-stocked toolkit.