IN the two and a half years that he has spent at Arsenal, Alexandre Lacazette has become one of the symbols of the club’s post-Arsène Wenger upheaval.
The former Lyon striker was Wenger’s final big summer signing and the last of the 28 French players who joined the club during the illustrious former manager’s 22-year tenure. After a successful debut campaign, in which he scored 17 goals in all competitions, he did his part to ensure a smooth transition to the Unai Emery era, scoring 19 times in 2018-19 and being voted Arsenal’s Player of the Season.
But as the limited momentum that Emery had managed to generate gradually spluttered out in the first half of the current campaign, so Lacazette’s form started to slide and with Mikel Arteta now at the helm, the 28-year-old’s future is beginning to look uncertain. Gabriel Martinelli’s emergence has intensified the competition for places in Arsenal’s front line and with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang now back from suspension, some of the club’s fans are starting to question Lacazette’s right to a place in the starting XI.
I really like Lacazette, but his performance so far simply has not justified the omission of our record signing, Martinelli having to play on the opposite side & Aubameyang playing out of position. He needs to do more.
— Patrick Timmons (@PatrickTimmons1) February 2, 2020
Although Arsenal went into the winter break on a run of seven games without defeat in all competitions, they have scored only 11 goals in the nine matches that they have played since Arteta’s appointment and no player incarnates their difficulties in front of goal more fully than Lacazette. The France international is one of only four players to have started all seven league games since Arteta came in – along with Bernd Leno, David Luiz and Mesut Özil – but he has not scored a goal in any of them.
Having also failed to find the net when Arsenal drew 0-0 at Everton in Freddie Ljungberg’s final game as interim head coach, Lacazette has now gone eight league games without scoring, equalling his worst previous run in the club’s colours between December 2017 and January 2018. It is only the second time since the end of the 2012-13 campaign that he has gone so many league games without seeing the ball hit the net.
His most recent performance, in Arsenal’s 0-0 draw at Burnley last weekend, represented a microcosm of his current malaise. Lacking sharpness, he mustered only two attempts at goal, neither of which found the target, before ceding his place to Eddie Nketiah in the closing stages. By the time Arsenal return to action at home to Newcastle United next weekend, Lacazette will have gone a full 12 months without scoring away from home in the league.
With only five league goals to his name, he is well off the pace he set in his first two seasons in north London and that’s despite taking roughly as many shots at goal as he did in those two campaigns (2.1 per game in 2017-18, 2.3 in 2018-19 and 2.1 in 2019-20, according to Opta).
But a closer look at his statistics suggests that Lacazette’s low returns in front of goal could partly be attributed to the way that his role has evolved since Arteta came in. The impression that he is now spending more time playing with his back to goal is backed up by figures that show his touches in the opposition box have fallen from an average of 5.25 per game under Emery this season to 4.43 per game under Arteta at the same time that the number of aerial duels he is contesting – an indication of a striker being used as more of a target man – has gone up (from 2.37 per game under Emery this season to 4.29 per game under Arteta).
Lacazette’s work-rate, which is another of his great strengths, does not appear to have diminished, but whereas he is now making more tackles per game under Arteta than he was under Emery (1.57 to 0.87), he is winning the ball back in the final third a lot less (0.29 per game to 1.12 per game), all of which serves to indicate that he is spending more of his time outside the final third of the pitch than he was previously.
Alexandre Lacazette has more yellow cards (1) than goals (0) in 2020.
He hasn’t scored a league goal since the 5th of December. pic.twitter.com/31IvkwK7su
— Statman Dave (@StatmanDave) February 2, 2020
Lacazette’s on-pitch relationship with Aubameyang is another argument against judging his goal-scoring statistics in isolation, since the Frenchman often brings out the best in his team-mate. Four of Lacazette’s 10 assists in the league last season were to the benefit of Aubameyang and although the pair failed to spark at Burnley, there was evidence of their complementarity in last month’s 1-1 draw at Crystal Palace, when Lacazette’s cleverly delayed pass freed his strike partner to score Arsenal’s opener.
When asked about Lacazette’s difficulties in front of goal, Arteta has spoken about the need for his team-mates to create better shooting opportunities for him, but the Spaniard has also pointed out that much of the work that Arsenal’s number nine does goes unnoticed.
“He has been really helpful in giving us a lot of options,” Arteta said in January. “He makes his team-mates better, that’s one of the biggest qualities.”
Lacazette’s scoring issues make it difficult to imagine him ending an exile from international football that now stretches back over two years. His last France appearance, in which he scored two goals in a 2-2 friendly draw against Germany in November 2017, was also his most accomplished, but an untimely knee injury nixed his hopes of a World Cup call-up the following year and he has not been recalled since. Nevertheless, with Olivier Giroud experiencing an even more miserable season across town at Chelsea, Lacazette could yet enter the Euro 2020 conversation if Giroud’s complete lack of playing time moves Didier Deschamps to start looking for alternatives with a comparable standard of hold-up play.
In a recent interview with RMC Sport, Lacazette’s former Lyon team-mate Jordan Ferri wondered whether the striker needed to become “more selfish” in front of goal. But although everyone at Arsenal wants to see Lacazette banging the goals in again, his selflessness remains a valuable asset.
