Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is Up There with Arsenal’s Best Ever Strikers

4 min read

4 Dec 2018 0 0

As things stand, he is the Premier League’s top scorer, the first player to reach double figures for the season. He has 20 goals in 27 league appearances since joining Arsenal in January, giving him a strike rate higher than any other player in the English game. Indeed, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has become quite the frontman for Arsenal.

Of course, the 29-year-old isn’t always the Gunners’ frontman, in the conventional sense of the term, sometimes playing on the left wing, but Aubameyang has become a defining talent at the Emirates Stadium in 2018. Most teams possess that one player who operates at a higher level to the rest – Chelsea have Eden Hazard, Liverpool have Mohamed Salah, Manchester United have David de Gea and Arsenal have Aubameyang.

Arsenal have always been a club defined by great strikers. Over the Arsene Wenger era alone, they had Denis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry and latterly Robin Van Persie. Each one of these strikers represented something different at a different point of the club’s history. Bergkamp, for instance, embodied the revolution Wenger sparked upon taking over. Henry was the reflection of Arsenal’s evolution into efficiently ruthless winners and Van Persie reflected the return to something more conventional, something less rooted in Wenger’s famed principles.

Aubameyang, like the company he is now starting to keep, represents something greater than just the goals he scores. The Gabonese striker presents the image of what Arsenal could become under Unai Emery. He is both stylish, but resourceful. Intense, but considered. In many ways, Aubameyang is a paradox of a player, possessing many contradictory traits, but they all combine to collectively make one of the most potent strikers in the European game right now.

—2 goals in the North London Derby
—First PL player to double-digit goals this season (10)

AUBAMEYANG.

(via @NBCSportsSoccer)pic.twitter.com/9rhlvdH3eR

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) December 2, 2018

This was on display in Arsenal’s North London derby win over Spurs, in which Aubameyang bagged a brace and contributed an assist. The Gunners were relentless in their intensity and high press, and Aubameyang led the line perfectly. He was everywhere and Spurs couldn’t cope with his movement and general forward play.

Alexandre Lacazette is another striker of high calibre currently at the Emirates Stadium, but Aubameyang is on a higher plane. His addition, for £56 million from Borussia Dortmund in January, could prove to be a real landmark moment for the Gunners, one that plays a significant role in the comprehensive overhaul of the club.

Arsenal are in a team and a club in transition at the moment. Aubameyang joined before Emery’s appointment in the summer, but nobody embodies the Spaniard’s masterplan better than the striker who leads the Premier League goalscoring chart at present. Just define Aubameyang purely by his goals.