Per Mertesacker - defying the 'laws' of the Premier League

A quick search of Per Mertesacker's name on Twitter and you'll quickly get a feel for the general public's perception of Arsenal's enormous German international.

'Slow'

That seems to be the word most commonly associated with Per. The word that consistently appears against his name, week after week, game after game. It's there every time Arsenal concede a goal and it's there every time the Gunners lose (although that hasn't happened very often recently).

Mertesacker's speed is highlighted by opposition coaches (Chelsea coach Christophe Lollichon expected Marseilles to exploit Arsenal by targeting Per in their recent Champions League fixture) and it's routinely picked on by pundits as a weakness in Arsenal's defence.

And yet, for all his athletic deficiencies, Per is continually selected for Arsenal and remains the mainstay of Germany's defence. It just doesn't add up.

Is it that the likes of Wenger, Low and Klinsmann have been blind to this for all these years? Do they not read the results of Per's sprint tests?

Or is it that Mertesacker, now capped 93 times for Germany, makes up for a lack of speed by being one of the most intelligent centre-backs to have graced our league in the last ten years?

I suspect the latter.

With or without Per

Whichever way you want to look at it, Arsenal are on a mighty fine run.

Since a 2-1 defeat to Spurs in March last season, they've lost just once on the opening day of this year to Aston Villa and beaten the likes of Bayern Munich, Marseilles and their North London rivals (in a more recent fixture) along the way. You don't need to be a detective to see that their run of form coincides with a consistent partnership between Koscielny and Mertesacker and the stats speak for themselves.

In the last 18 matches, they've averaged a clean sheet every other game and effectively blunted the likes of Soldado, Michu, Berbatov and Lukaku on separate occasions. They've only drawn twice since the defeat in March and only against Villa have the pair conceded more than once in a Premier League match.

There is no doubting that Koscielny has been crucial to Arsenal's change in fortunes but he's not often singled out for criticism. Per, on the other hand, has been targeted ever since joining Arsenal and yet his performances suggest that much of the criticism has been unfair.

The German's stats are up there with the best when it comes to interceptions and aerial battles won, and whilst he's not somebody who wins lots of tackles, he makes up for that by giving so few fouls away. Oh and to top it off, he's even managed to chip in with three goals, the most recent against Stoke last weekend.

Those first five yards...

Playing centre-half for Arsenal is no easy gig.

Wenger's style permits his full backs to involve themselves in the play whenever his side have got the ball and the likes of Gibbs and Sagna are deemed essential when Arsenal attack. It makes the Gunners a potent attacking force but it also leaves them vulnerable if they give the ball away.

The pitch below shows the space left for opposition teams to exploit when counter-attacking Arsenal. With the full-backs out of position, Mertesacker and Koscielny are left to cover vast swathes of the pitch.

So, the question is: How could somebody like Mertesacker, deemed lethargic, cope with these situations and still remain effective?

With Per, it's all about those 'first five yards' being played out in his head. The German clearly has an outstanding football brain that allows him to anticipate danger and cut out threatening attacks decisively. His positional sense is unmatched across the league and it enables him to deal with attacking players whose speed he can't match. Where other defenders rely on their athleticism to get them out of trouble, covering up mistakes, Per consistently gets himself in the right place, at the right time, and deals with the problem before it becomes catastrophic.




The best is yet to come

Mertesacker has been prodigious at the heart of Arsenal's defence and Wenger is reaping the reward for showing faith in the towering defender. His leadership qualities are gradually coming to the fore, he's got the respect of his teammates and slowly but surely, he's starting to win round the doubters.

The obsession with athleticism and in particular, speed over the ground, has driven people to assume that a lanky and ungainly athlete like Mertesacker would never make it in the English top flight. And yet, if we were to look at the central defenders who've stood out in the Premier League era, they'd all have one thing in common; a footballing intelligence that surpasses their more athletically gifted peers.

Per fits nicely into this category.

Thanks for taking the time to read.