What does Ramsey bring to our game?

Just to illustrate how close Ramsey is to their quality. Vidal is 29 next month, Rakitic is 28, Ramsey is 25 and Pogba is 23.

Passing:

His accuracy is consistently high, he’s one of the most prolific passers of the bunch and he’s more or less the same as the others in terms of his key pass contribution.

Defensive:

Ramsey is pretty good defensively when compared to the others except his tackle accuracy has dropped massively and he’s increasingly likely to be dribbled past. This could be due to his extensive time playing at right wing but I’d like to see both areas significantly improved next season.

On the Ball:

Mixed bag because on the one hand he’s doing excellent work then on the other he gets dispossessed and takes a lot of bad touches. This could be a PL effect going on though as he’s fouled less than the others so it could be that he’s not getting the calls the others are.

Shooting:

He’s less consistent but on average more or less the same here.

We play a 4231 formation though mid-season due to injury issues we were playing with two forwards, Özil very high up the pitch and Flamini really deep.. Compare that to, say, Barcelona who play a very clear 433 with Busquets, Rakitic and Iniesta all sharing the space in the middle.

I’m not exactly what Bayern Munich and Juventus are playing at the moment but when Vidal and Pogba were both at Juventus as Conte was in charge they were playing, as the man himself said, a 433/352 system (which both have that 1-2 central midfield shape).

Basically if you look at mid-season, which is when Ramsey was playing CM, he was asked to do too much (Defend, Control, Create and Score) by Wenger while not having any support from Flamini, the wide players or Özil. By the time Coquelin was back the whole team was in dire form and Coquelin has taken a while to get back up to speed himself.

Compare that to Rakitic who always has support from Busquets and Iniesta in the middle without fail or Vidal and Pogba who had each other and Pirlo while at Juventus.

You say that he seems to have lost sight of what he is good at but I'd counter that and say our entire squad has played much of this season looking lost and hiding too far up the pitch or too deep.

There's an element of truth to what Mortal-Man says but it's actually more of a combination between our team positional issues (Just look at the mid-season picture above, it's why we were so poor at Old Trafford and why Wenger brought on Iwobi instead of Campbell, he could see we were getting stopped at the centre circle as Ramsey had no passing options and the fullbacks were pressed relentlessly) and his personal form/confidence than him being literally physically/mentally incapable. As you can see above he wasn't having the technical difficulties in 12/13 and 13/14.

/r/Gunners Thread Parent