Don’t leave me with a bad goodbye

By Josh Glover*

I’m overjoyed that Granit Xhaka is finally leaving Arsenal! But not because I hate him; in fact, quite the opposite. I think he’s been a loyal and faithful servant to the club these last seven years, and I want to see him leave with the kind of goodbye that so many of my favourite Arsenal players of the last 15 years haven’t been afforded.

Santi Cazorla’s Arsenal career ended with him in the treatment room for the better part of two years (when he wasn’t in the hospital–remember, it was touch and go whether his foot would have to be amputated). Tomáš Rosický, similar story. Aaron Ramsey, same deal. Alex Iwobi! No sooner than I’d promoted him to the exalted position of my favourite Arsenal player following the departure of Aaron Ramsey, he was sold out of the blue to the Blues.

And now I’m going to reveal the names of two of my favourites that will inevitably have some Arsenal fans wondering what is wrong with me.

The first is Andrei Arshavin. What’s not to love about the little scamp, really? Think of the talent! Remember the goals–the four at Anfield but especially that one to beat Barcelona in the Champions League! Recall that impish smile and infectious laugh! Ruminate over the joy he obviously got from playing the game… and the joy he obviously got from eating biscuits and pies!

And of course the sadness. Every great story has to have sadness mixed with joy, lows mixed with highs, and this story did not disappoint (at least in that respect; obviously it disappointed in the end, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself). Arshavin was reportedly heartbroken by Russia’s failure to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, and his performances for Arsenal started to dip after that. Whether that was more down to the heartbreak of missing out on the World Cup or his love of the good life in London is hard to say–probably a little from column A and a little from column B–but he certainly lost that spark that made him such a fun player to watch.

He went from a nailed-on starter to an impact sub to a sub who didn’t make much of an impact to a benchwarmer who almost never got on the pitch. That was horrible for me to watch. I kept waiting for him to shed his inhibitions, shrug off the weight of the world that he seemed to be carrying on his shoulders (or the weight of the pies that he was carrying lower on his frame, whichever), and work the magic that we’d seen in his first couple of seasons in North London. But he didn’t. He just trudged around the pitch and turned the ball over and didn’t track back and didn’t look like he remembered which postcode the goal was in… until that February night at the Emirates when he made a well-timed run into the area, picked his spot, and curled one past Victor Valdés.

I remember the hairs on my neck standing up as Martin Tyler screamed “Arshaviiiiiin!”, leaping to my feet as the ball hit the net with my three year old son in my arms, doing a little dance and struggling to keep my shout of joy strictly inaudible so as not to wake my partner sleeping in the next room, and laughing my ass off as Arshavin pulled his shirt over his head to reveal a t-shirt underneath with a picture of himself with his finger to his lips. That even earned a chuckle and a shake of the head from Arsène, as I recall.

What a goal! What a moment!

But it was only a moment, and it was Arshavin’s last memorable moment in an Arsenal shirt. Following a string of indifferent and disinterested performances, he was loaned back to Zenit St. Petersburg the following winter, then came back to Arsenal for one more season (which I had honestly forgotten, so few were his minutes in the 2012-13 season) before finally joining Zenit permanently in the summer of 2013. By that time, his star had faded so much that there probably weren’t too many tears in the collective eyes of Arsenal fans around the world when he left the club. But there were tears in my eyes, tears that he didn’t leave on a high, didn’t have a redemption arc, didn’t finally remind us why we were so excited when he was signed on deadline day in January 2008 and almost single-handedly ensured that we finished in the top four that season, scoring and/or assisting in seven of the 12 matches he played in, none of which we lost.

The second name I’ll drop is Niklas Bendtner, AKA Mick Bendtnaaah, AKA The Greatest Strikaaah That Evaaah Liiived. Yeah, yeah, I can hear the laughter coming through the internet, but you can’t help who you fall for, and I fell hard for old Nicky B. The start of this love affair was 2009. I was living in Dublin, and hadn’t yet made the transition from person who likes Arsenal to full-on Arsenal supporter, but I watched Arsenal when one of our matches was shown on Irish TV (back then, you could get Premier League matches on regular cable without having to pay for special sports packages, which I doubt is still the case) and I knew who Niklas Bendtner was: a guy who scored some good goals… and of course missed some great chances. Which all strikers do, to be fair, but Bendtner got a bit of a reputation for missing sitters–unfairly, in my mind, but probably more down to his, erm, enhanced self confidence rather than his actual goals versus expected goals (which no one was tracking back then, or if they were, no one was writing about, or if they were, I don’t remember it). [I was since referred to a Wikipedia article which points to 2009 as one of the first mentions of “expected goals” in the context of “soccer”, published on the Soccermetrics Research blog.]

So anyway, we had a foosball table at work, which we used more than we probably should have (but hey, the code was compiling), and I was a somewhat mercurial player, capable of brilliance one minute and looking like I’d never even seen a foosball table before the next. My coworker Brian dubbed me “the Niklas Bendtner of foosball”, because I was associated with Arsenal, was blond (and back then, it wasn’t even courtesy of a bottle), and missed some absolute sitters. Oh yeah, and I perceived myself as the greatest foosaaah… that evaaah liiived.

I thought it was hilarious, and really leaned into it. I changed my chat avatar (what were we using back then for work chat? This was years before Slack) to a picture of Niklas Bendtner, and even bought a Danish national team shirt with his name on the back during a trip to Copenhagen later that year.

And yeah, even I admit that Nicky was a lot. Even he knows it now; check out his interview on the Arsecast if you want to hear his take on how his poor choices meant that he never reached the potential that we all saw in him when he was smashing in goals for the U-21s all those years ago.

In his defence, though, I think he was a lot less of an egocentric prat than he was perceived by Arsenal fans. I mean, he never actually said that he was the greatest striker who ever lived, he said that he wanted to become the greatest striker who ever lived. And what’s wrong with that as a goal? I want to see a perfectly egalitarian society where everyone’s basic needs are met and no one exploits or oppresses anyone else, and even if that is extraordinarily unlikely to happen in my lifetime–or ever, if I’m really honest about it–what’s wrong with that desire being a North Star in my life? And why shouldn’t an elite athlete, in a highly competitive environment, want to be the greatest?

As for missing sitters, every single striker, even the greats, misses some that even my grandmother would put away. Henry. Van Persie (sorry). Auba (come on, he was great for Dortmund and for the first couple of years that he played for us). Even the Holy Jesus Himself.

And the silly things he did? Who among us hasn’t made a move on a taxi when we were in our cups? Oh, everyone among us? OK, fair enough. My point is that young people make terrible decisions all the time, and I don’t think Bendtner was worse than most, just higher profile.

But yeah, I get why a lot of Arsenal fans didn’t rate him or didn’t like him (or both), but I bet even those people celebrated like wild when he scored the winner against Cardiff on that rainy New Year’s Day at the Emirates back in 2014 to keep us top of the league. I remember the roar of the home crowd when the goal went in, and the standing ovation as he hobbled off the pitch, having injured his ankle in the process of scoring. Redemption for our most wayward of sons in front of the home fans!

Of course, that wasn’t the end. I can’t remember if Bendtner’s ankle recovered enough for him to play again that season, but I do remember that no one really cared when his contract expired that summer and he joined Wolfsburg on a free.

So back to Granit Xhaka. I love Granit Xhaka. I think he’s a really good player and an even better leader. He’s been a real bellwether for criticism over the years, one of the first to be blamed when we don’t win, but he’s always done his best to do what has been asked of him. The proof of that particular pudding has been in the eating: all three Arsenal managers Xhaka played for picked him for basically every match he was fit for. And given that he was basically always fit, that was basically every match.

Of course, there were a few games he wasn’t picked for after telling 60,000 people to fuck off that time at the Emirates. I have to say, though, that those 60,000 people largely had it coming. Xhaka was basically blamed for the failings of a team with huge problems, deployed in a position where he was constantly exposed on the counter–backed up by such defensive stalwarts as Mustafi, Socrates, and David Luiz–and the amount of abuse that was heaped on him was absurd. So I didn’t blame him for his reaction upon reflection (I’ll be the first to admit that I was less generous at the time it happened). I feel like you’ve got to be willing to take what you’re happy to dish out, and honestly, that spiky edge to Xhaka’s character is something that a lot of us have been praising over the course of the last several seasons.

Was that behaviour becoming the captain of Arsenal Football Club? Of course not, and he had to be stripped of the captaincy after that. But he never lost the respect of his teammates, and he remained an important leader in the dressing room after being convinced to stay by Arteta when it looked absolutely certain that he would depart for Hertha Berlin that January. And he slowly but surely won back the respect of more and more of the fanbase with his committed performances, who could see that he was an important part of Arteta’s project, which more and more fans were starting to get behind.

As a Xhaka true believer, imagine my delight at his renaissance this season, finally deployed in a position where his strengths have been on full display whilst his weaknesses haven’t been as exposed as in previous seasons. With every goal, every ovation from the home fans, you could see that Xhaka was finally feeling the love from the fans, the love that he had been deserving of for so long.

As the season wound down, reports started coming in that Xhaka would be heading back to Germany at the end of the season, reports that were met with sadness by many of the Arsenal faithful. Still, all things have to come to an end, and leading up to the final match of the season, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Xhaka would receive a fond send off from the home fans at full time, and surely he’d be looking forward to the lap of appreciation after the match.

I’d wager that no one predicted what transpired that day, though. Xhaka scored a thumping header on 11 minutes, and the roof absolutely came off the Emirates. A more perfect ending to Xhaka’s Arsenal story could not be found… except it was when Xhaka found the net again three minutes later! The smile on his face as the Emirates erupted and his teammates engulfed him in celebration said it all: this is the end, dear friends. And what an end to an amazing story! The highs, the lows, the absurdities, and the inexorable progress of his redemption arc, culminating in a Man of the Match performance on a glorious summer day, basking in the love of his teammates, coaches, and supporters alike.

And that is why I’m happy he’s leaving, happy that that was his last game in an Arsenal shirt, happy that he didn’t leave us with a bad goodbye.

*Josh describes himself as “Arsenal fan in Sweden, lover of all things Rosicky, known to scare dogs when Arsenal score.” You can follow Josh on Twitter.