Granit Xhaka is the news again barely 24-hours after being issued a red card that nearly derailed the course of Arsenal’s rise on the table.
According to Goal.com, he seems to be entangled in racial abuse drama with a female staff of Heathrow London Airport.
The report states that the frustration of his fiancèe’s brother missing his flight back to Germany after arriving late coupled with his earlier frustrations from the Burnley game, got him all wired up.
Having experienced what a scenario like arriving late for boarding is like and Terminal 5 staff disposition to such matters, I can only peg this one down to being human.
If he weren’t so popular, it wouldn’t even be in the news. Truth be told, the London Police haven’t released an official statement yet on the matter after a third party was said to have reported the incident which prompted Xhaka to visit the police station voluntarily to give his own account of the situation.
Xhaka needs to steer clear of occasions of provocation as he seems to be targeted by elements of distraction on and off the pitch. To be frank, though, he is making it quite easy to be targeted with his apparent propensity for losing his cool.
Later that day, however, he seemed to be in a better head space judging from his Instagram post from the bonding dinner organized by Captain Per Mertesacker.
Speaking of the Dinner, Mesut Özil was conspicuously missing from the fold which has sent headline-mongers into a frenzy and quite frankly even some of the Gunners’ faithful.
Well, reports from metro.co.uk claim he was given time off by the Boss and was already in Sweden and even spotted at Gothenburg shopping on Monday. The dinner was on Tuesday.
Unlike other seasons of recent memory, Arsene Wenger seems to have found his thunder again. Having claimed a year before it happened that his team were capable of going unbeaten, that conviction seems to have returned.
This inference has been given a further boost by Theo Walcott’s revelation about Arsene Wenger’s motivational speech to them which he (Walcott) compared to that legendary speech by Al Pacino in the sport’s movie “Any Given Sunday” or popularly referred to as “the inches speech”.
Sadly we do not have a transcript of Wenger’s words, however, if the team got the idea the manager was passing based on the similarities highlighted by Theo Walcott, then I can conclude the “Ambitious Wenger” has returned and this season just got brighter for me on a personal note.
Till the next thought. …
