I was, and still am, a very big fan of Radiohead, but especially so when I was a teenager and they were in their pomp. Like many my age, my interest in them piqued with their 1995 release ‘The Bends’ and sustained through the pained paean to modern life that was ‘OK Computer’ in 1997. News of a new LP circulated in 2000, whilst I was at sixth-form college and I awaited their latest offering with anticipation. Having achieved commercial success with a progressive rock formula of catchy songs and memorable lyrics, the band threw a musical curve ball with the new release.
Kid A was a huge departure from their previous style and the album created a great deal of debate. Was this an act of commercial sabotage? Had they become scared of success? Or afraid of failure? Or had they taken a brave artistic risk at the peak of their powers? The debate rumbled on and on and on. Camps were erected and lines drawn in the sand. Those that scoffed at a band committing artistic suicide were at once accused of simply “not getting it” by the clique in the opposing trench. Personally I loved (and still love) the album for its fragile genius, but it soon struck me that people had become more interested in “the debate” than the LP itself.
Some 15 years on, I am left with a similar feeling of bafflement over another work of frail seeming genius. Mesut Özil has polarised opinion in a manner that few other players have managed. There are plenty of ‘marmite’ players in circulation, those that veer somewhere between devastating and dreadful depending on who you speak to. But few have set off such a philosophical contretemps as the waif like German playmaker. Özil’s two and a half seasons at Arsenal have, thus far, felt like a never ending quest for one upmanship between rival factions.
His time in the Premier League illustrates the extent to which the analysis of football has become a competitive industry in its own right. The game is not, as some wags will attest, about opinions. Opinions do not kick footballs into goal nets after all. However, the act of talking, and by extension arguing, about football has become a sidecar to the Premier League motorbike. Özil unwittingly feeds this soap opera through subtlety. By now, it is not necessary for me to explain that he is a poltergeist like presence on matches, that you don’t always see him, but you’ll always know he’s been there once you survey the wreckage he has created.
His cerebral qualities have been written about, remarked upon and argued about ad nauseam. In England, the very visible dismantling of Gareth Barry in the 2010 World Cup our first encounter with Özil prior to this transfer to Arsenal. In time, we have learned that that was a slightly atypical Mesut performance, his influence on the construct of a game is more Brian Eno than Mick Jagger. It took time for this idea to germinate for many however, and battle lines were drawn between those that “got” Özil and those that didn’t.
In many ways, he has become an embodiment of football’s philosophical wrangling with analytics. The eye would often tell you, on first viewing at least, that Mesut had been ineffectual, but the numbers would tell a different tale. How many chances created again? With every passing match, the war waged. The critics would scathe at another listless display, in response, the Özilites would emerge from over the hill, carrying memes and whoscored graphics like bow and arrows, firing them back over the boughs. “Özil was crap today,” “You just don’t get it!” and so it would go on, an internecine battle for supremacy. The backlash, followed by the backlash against the backlash.
In March 2014, the Daily Mail’s Neil Ashton escalated the propaganda war (war’s first casualty is always truth, as Aeschylus once opined) by accusing ‘Lost and lazy’ Özil of ‘nicking a living’ after he pulled his hamstring against Bayern Munich. This critique was of course, hysterical, and probably deliberately so. This was the Daily Mail, after all. But the spin war had reached DEFCON 1, full strategic arsenal. Ashton’s WUMing created a frisson of sensitivity in the Arsenal fan base. The infamous “nicking a living” line was hoisted up the flagpole and presented as the default line of the British media hive mind. (Truth is not just the first casualty of war, it’s a repeat patient).
By now, Özil’s every action took on significance beyond the pitch. Every assist was forged into bragging meme in the social media battlefield, accompanied by the sardonic hashtag #nickingaliving. Comparisons abound with the playmakers of Arsenal’s competitors, Coutinho, Mata, Silva, Hazard, di Maria and so forth. Many of us became so keen to fashion Özil’s exploits into gloating currency, it kind of feels like we forgot to just enjoy watching him. Just like Kid A all those years ago, underappreciated through overappreciation. The intellectual posturing of the phoney war had overtaken the joy of Mesut’s output.
Of course, in this environment, it also became very difficult to offer any level of criticism of Özil without immediately being declared a heretic. His subtlety preceded him. Even those that accepted his understatedness, felt the atmosphere too oppressive to offer any kind of critique, now matter how mild. I think my overriding impression of Özil’s first 18 months at Arsenal were that I understood and enjoyed his easy glide. I thought that he was playing very well but that, in truth, he could be doing more. I wanted to see him take games by the scruff of the neck.
I don’t mean that in the Patrick Vieira / Roy Keane sense of the phrase. I mean that Özil always looked like the best player on the pitch when Arsenal were playing well, but I felt he could do more when games were tight and the stakes high. Lately, there is little doubt that he is doing just that. Recognition from the wider football census continues to trickle in. In some respects, this is because the penny is beginning to drop. It is understandable that a club’s fans, who agonise and obsess over every second of their club’s timeline, notice phenomena before less frantic observers. But the census is also shifting towards the Özilites because he is playing better now than he was.
It is no longer as necessary to squint to see his influence, you don’t need a highlights reel to view it in retrospect. It’s much more obvious, there is no need to struggle to understand any longer. In turn, this means there is longer a pressing need to explain (if indeed, there ever was). And so let us down tools and conscientiously object to this phoney war. Let us not idle away the peak years of this creative talent in defensiveness, using his gentle charms to take up arms with an imagined enemy. Football is not a game of opinions, it is a sport that, at its most dashing, wears the attire of art. That being the case, we as Arsenal fans get to watch Özil paint pictures on the football pitch, for which we can be grateful.
Follow me on Twitter @Stillberto
