Alexis Gave More to Arsenal Than Theo Ever Did

Change, it seems, is afoot at Arsenal. Gazidis has finally pulled the trigger and is starting the long overdue re-build of the club to prepare it for the post-Wenger era. We’ve got Sven doing transfers, the guy from Barca as de facto Director of Football, and Huss doing contracts. Quite how Wenger fits into this, and who actually has the final say over transfers is unclear. But surely, the monolith has begun to dissolve.

As a consequence, this has been one of the more consequential January transfer windows in recent history. Within it, two players have been sold, both of whom stand as emblems of the club’s decline under Wenger.

The first is Alexis. It’s easy to forget now, but Alexis was signed in a period of great hope for the club. We’d signed Ozil, broken our trophy drought, and seemingly taken a number of steps towards reinforcing our squad in the summer of 2014. Alexis hit the ground running, we won the cup again in 2015, and we were poised to take the great leap forward with a few more additions.

But none came. Wenger, in one of his signature moments of imperial decline, decided to sign no outfield players in the summer of 2015. We lost our opening home game to West Ham, recovered, then blew the easiest league campaign in a generation, with Leicester (Leicester) winning the title as our nominal rivals struggled.

When you look back at Alexis’ career, his second season at the club was largely bereft of open displays of insolence, but this was clearly the moment he realized he’d been had. Unlike most of the dross that has populated the team in the last decade, Alexis is an elite football player; a true winner. He will do anything to win and doesn’t care what bridges he burns along the way. This, of course, blew minds within the squad. While Giroud was busy celebrating a draw at Bournemouth, Alexis threw his gloves at the ground in disgust. He, wait for it, didn’t like being substituted. He told team members how he felt about our mediocrity in training; shock rained down. He fell on his haunches in Munich, appalled at the humiliation we’d received.

So, of course, the club have relentlessly briefed against Alexis since he was dropped for the away game at Liverpool earlier this year. He’s difficult, he plays for himself, he’s selfish, he’s a brat. We’re better off without him.

This is curious, because Alexis is, by a distance, the best player that Arsenal have had since the Invincibles. He has consistently produced. He has scored goals in big games against virtually every team. He scored in both cup finals he has played in for the club. He has single handedly won games on countless occasions. Until Lacazette scored yesterday, he was our joint top scorer in a season he had supposedly given up on, were we to believe the lines coming out of Colney.

The truth is that Alexis exposed the ever-diminishing expectations of the late Wenger era. Arsene has passed from revolutionary to reactionary and refuses to countenance players that expose him. Alexis asked simple questions – why aren’t the other players as good as me? Why don’t they care as much about winning as I do? What are we going to do to stop this relentless momentum towards mediocrity?

Alexis will earn a huge payday at United. Within the warped world of football wages, he deserves it. He is a game-changer, a force of nature who only cares about getting that next goal, regardless of the score. Seeing the logistical cartwheels that Arsenal fans have undergone in the last week to claim that losing Alexis for an inferior players is ‘the best we could’ve done in the circumstances’ is instructive. We have become so relentlessly attuned to underperforming that losing our best player to our supposed rivals has somehow become something of a triumph.

The circumstances should never have arisen. We should have brought proper reinforcements in 2015, won the league in 2016, and be basking in a golden ending to the Wenger era. How far we done fell.  

Contrast Alexis to Theo. There has been nothing but good wishes for Theo. Good old Theo. Stats Theo. A goal every 4 games Theo! Never complained did Theo. Loyal servant to the club. No mischief from him.

Just lots and lots and lots of bad performances. The fact that Theo got to almost 400 games in an Arsenal shirt is emblematic of the lowered standards that plagued the second half of the Wenger era. His stats are bolstered by braces and hat-tricks against the likes of Bate Borisov and League Cup nobodies. Theo’s record stands at about nine-ish goals a season. This was a guy who twice held Arsenal to ransom over his contract, culminating in his ludicrous stint at centre-forward. Bayern were surely quaking in their boots when they realized old Theo would be up against their centre-backs. When the signature phrase of your career is "unlucky Theo", it's not because you were a world-class player.

And look – Theo is clearly a nice guy, But who cares? I’d rather 11 winners who hated each other and won than 11 Theos who had a nice time at work together and took L after L when it counted. The fact that Theo’s greatest moment for Arsenal, his slalom run against Liverpool in the Champions League, happened ten years ago says it all. If you wanted a figure that summed up the second half of Arsene’s reign, it would be Theo – flashes of brilliance, injuries at key moments, and a lack of bottle when it ultimately counted. It may sound churlish to talk about Theo in this way, but he should have left the club long ago. To put it another way, Alexis could’ve fought Ljungberg or Pires for a starting spot in the Invincibles XI; Theo wouldn’t even make the bench. Given our colossal resources, it’s not unreasonable for us to demand players of the calbire and mentality of Alexis, rather than Theo, as the norm at the club; we must resist every attempt to make us think otherwise.

That the likes of Theo and Coquelin are finally being cleared out is a reason for hope. But only if Arsene follows. Otherwise, no matter who we sign over the next few weeks, the club cannot move forward.  Here’s hoping.

Gb.