longer.blue

There is a time and a place for Viktor Gyokeres. Or more accurately, there’s a time for Viktor Gyokeres and a place he needs his teammates to be in. Against Tottenham Hotspur was the time. Eberechi Eze and Arsenal put themselves in the right place. Suddenly Gyokeres had players close by to him. No longer was he left up front and isolated from support, expected to fend for himself. That’s not his game. That will never be his game. We see big strikers and we assume things. Perceptions over what Romelu Lukaku should or could be over what he is are an instructive parallel to draw here. From early on, the Belgian was tagged as the next Didier Drogba due to his size, which saw him profiled as a centre-forward who would pin defenders back and dominate the final third, especially when he followed in the footsteps of Drogba to join Chelsea. Yet like Gyokeres, that wasn’t Lukaku’s game. Lukaku and Gyokeres are both more like poachers than target men. You want them running into the box, not playing with their backs to goal. When you play them like target men, their flaws become all too obvious. Both players have been mocked for looking like they play football wearing jeans. However, if you lean into their strengths, both strikers can score goals as their records show. You just need to let them play on the run. Let others have the ball. You want a player like Gyokeres or Lukaku to be on the end of a pass into the final third, not laying up balls for other players to run on to. To be frank, neither Gyokeres nor Lukaku or other players of their ilk are good enough to play the role of the complete centre-forward. They are limited specialists not virtuoso all-rounders. Tools on the Swiss Army knife rather the Swiss Army knife themselves. And if you work with that reality rather than against it then that’s ok. A club like Arsenal can afford to spend big money on a player who merely fills a niche rather than the solution to every problem up front. For every season where Mikel Arteta’s team has fallen short so far, the club have been admonished for having lacked a more basic, concentrated goal threat to put chances away. In Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz, Arsenal already have a pair of renaissance men who can do it all. What they needed was something rather more medieval. Enter Gyokeres, a big, dumb, destructive siege weapon to launch boulders at the club’s enemies when cleverness and choreography could not win the day. The key is what you deploy around him. Arsenal’s big win over Tottenham showed they might finally have an inkling over how to make Gyokeres into a weapon instead of remaining a weakness. Get close to him and suddenly his ropey touch, clumsy approach play and unexpected timidness to go it alone on solo runs to find passes he fears may never come melt away. With Eze floating behind him, and the likes of Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka buzzing about in his peripheral vision, he became a forward confident in his purpose. His job was stripped back, simplified and clarified, and that’s how you make sense of Viktor Gyokeres. That’s how a man who can’t do it all can be a man who wins it all.