jones wrote:
Xhaka is 29 years old and has played close to 250 games for us, he's a known entity at this point. No you actually can't expect him to not lunge in and miss the ball how many times does he have to do that for your expectations to change?
Being mad at him takes you only so far, the responsibility goes to the bloke fielding him. Or would you blame someone like Patino or Azeez if they were fucking up every match week while continuously being started by the manager?
Xhaka is Xhaka is Xhaka. We had the chance to sell him and sold the other younger homegrown and currently much better CM on our books. We could've bought someone to bench him last summer and didn't, and as we're seeing it's not because White depleted our budget but because the manager chose not to.
Look, I fully agree with the bolded. But I disagree with absolving Xhaka of all blame. Precisely because he is a 29 year old seasoned professional earning millions. I will never stop demanding better from him, because it's his fucking job to not screw us over every other time he plays. I personally don't expect any better from him, but that doesn't make it any better. It's not like he lacks the ability, he just refuses to learn and ther's no excuse for that.
It's all semantics though, as I said, I do blame Arteta for the midfield situation, I think loaning out AMN was moronic and not selling Xhaka even worse. My original post was also in response to blaming Wenger for buying him in the first place. And that's why I said it's all a bit redundant, because sure you can argue that Wenger is at fault for buying him, Emery is at fault for making him an integral part of the dressing room, Arteta is at fault for still playing him, but at the end of the day, while there's a bit of truth to all of that, it's Xhaka who's on the pitch making mistakes and thus, for me, it's chiefly his fault for fucking up. I do agree Arteta bears some responsibility, I guess we just disagree on how much.
