Arsenal need more from Martin Odegaard and captain has biggest stage yet to step up | OneFootball

Gunners need their captain and orchestrator tonight

The best captains, of course, always go down with the ship, but Arsenal are by no means sunk yet - quite the opposite, in fact, as they steam down the Seine towards tonight’s Champions League semi-final against Paris Saint-Germain, ‘only’ 90 minutes and a couple of goals away from the biggest club game of all.

And yet there is no disputing that what started as hysterical grumblings on social media months ago has now flowered into genuine, if reluctant, doubts among match-going and reasonable fans.

Rightly or wrongly, the assessment is this: Odegaard’s underwhelming performances have been symbolic of Arsenal’s worrying Premier League drop-off either side of huge European matches over which he has not had the influence he, or anyone else, would like.

Martin Odegaard has struggled all season

Action Images via Reuters

Here in Paris last night, team-mate Declan Rice launched a fierce defence of his captain. He insisted his dip in form is only that, the kind every player goes through. Forget not that Rice started this season slowly and has only been his old self - or this even better version - since around the turn of the year.

Primarily, though, he talked up Odegaard’s leadership. “He’s got the full respect to the dressing room, the way he demands, the way he drives the team, the way he speaks,” Rice said. “You wouldn’t see him as that type of character, but he really is behind the scenes.

“He’s been amazing for us and I wouldn’t want anyone else being our captain.”

All of that is clearly true. Odegaard was made captain by Mikel Arteta early in his project and has been seen as the on-field embodiment of his manager ever since, not to mention a model ambassador off it.

But there are plenty of players in this Arsenal team who can lead. Rice is one, William Saliba and Jurrien Timber are others. The injured Gabriel and the experienced Jorginho are key dressing room figures. Bukayo Saka is, too, in his own way.

Tonight, though, there will be no room for excuse or explanation. Arsenal need their captain, yes, but their orchestrator, too

There are, by contrast, none who can do what Odegaard does with a football. That much was clear in the early part of the season, when Arsenal lost their No8 to injury and, for a while, their footballing identity as well.

His return against Chelsea just before the November international break, and then as Arsenal scored 13 goals in three games the following week, really did make you question the kind of analysis we churn out in these spaces every day. What is the point of any of it, when really it is as simple as one player being quite so pivotal to his team’s failure or success?

Maybe it has been some delayed knock-on from that injury, or maybe as Rice, suggested, simply an unexplainable, inevitable fluctuation in form. Missing Saka and Ben White for chunks of the season, as well as Kai Havertz up front, making familiar patterns obsolete, cannot have helped either.

Tonight, though, there will be no room for excuse or explanation. Arsenal need their captain, yes, but their orchestrator, too, with those slick feints to evade a ferocious Parisian press and the passes to unlock a defence that looked ominously secure once it decided to shut up shop late on in north London last week.

For Arteta’s team, as both he and Rice declared last night, there is a chance to make history.

And for Odegaard, facing unfamiliar but not unjustified criticism, the chance, too, to shut one or two doubters up.