Ray Parlour believes that Arsenal need their own Sergio Aguero or Diego Costa as their talisman if they want to salvage games. This comes after the 2-0 loss at home to West Ham.
Arsene Wenger’s men were gunned down 2-0 on the opening day of the season in the most anticlimactic way possible – two Petr Cech lapses in concentration and less-than impressive showings from Mesut Ozil, Santi Cazorla and Olivier Giroud.
Parlour believes that a lack of goals in the locker could be Arsenal’s disease: “That is a position they’ve got to look at,” he told Sky Sports News HQ. “Everyone is going to jump on the bandwagon now but it’s a long, hard season and there’s a long way to go.
“If you look at Man City, you know Sergio Aguero is their main man, for Manchester United it’s Wayne Rooney and at Chelsea, it’s Diego Costa. Who is it at Arsenal?”
Parlour believes the team as of this moment lacks a reliable goalscorer and expressed a measure of uncertainty on who was the better of Giroud or Theo Walcott, perhaps hinting that neither of them cut the mustard.
“I didn’t know who would start for Arsenal on Sunday because Theo Walcott started the Community Shield. I don’t think they have someone who you can say ‘he’s definitely going to play and he will score us goals’.”
Tangentially, the Arsenal legend also touched on Petr Cech’s nightmarish debut, expressing that it was the wrong decision by the Czech Republican to come traipsing out of his comfort zone to stop Chiekhou Kouyate’s goal-bound effort: “It was a mistake, certainly, he (Cech) made a decision to come and he’s got to take everyone out,” he said. “The decision he made was the wrong one and he’ll hold his hands up to that.
“On the second one, they need to close him down, run to the ball and make it difficult for him. The team performance wasn’t good enough for Arsenal.”
And Parlour believes that it was a lack of concentration that caused Arsenal to throw the game away.
“There were poor decisions all round. I think it’s concentration sometimes. They showed that bit of resilience against Chelsea in the Community Shield but it wasn’t there on Sunday,” he said.
