Arsenal's Kai Havertz conundrum will take time and patience

In his own words, that’s how Mikel Arteta wooed his wife and how Kai Havertz must approach the (apparently) comparable task of overcoming a tough start to the season and enjoy a happy marriage with Arsenal.

It wasn’t the most compelling argument or persuasive analogy, but the characteristics chosen by Arteta are instructive.

From his perspective, what Havertz needs is resolve, focus and hard work; mentality rather than anything tactical or technical.

After a hat-trick of sorts against Manchester United — an air shot in the box, a sloppy pass that led to Marcus Rashford’s opener and a soft fall for a VAR-overturned penalty — Arsenal supporters probably disagree with the manager’s assessment.

It’s true that all three incidents can be viewed as a side-effect of low confidence and the timidity that accompanies it.

Havertz’s decision to go down in the box in particular, when he could have stepped through to shoot, reflected an apparitional hesitancy we see far too often, and felt symptomatic of the Havertz conundrum.

It was a far cry from the swaggering confidence of his penalty-box play at Bayer Leverkusen.

But Havertz as spectral — as the Premier League’s phantom menace — is a phenomenon borne of a tactical misunderstanding of his talents and of a tactical recalibration at Arsenal that was always going to require time and patience.

Understanding how to use Havertz

The German’s best position has always been as a number ten, where his tendency to haunt a football pitch allowed him to ghost unseen into pockets of space, either arriving late to finish a move or drifting into the half-spaces to play an intelligent one-touch pass round the corner.

However, across three seasons at Chelsea only 23% of his minutes came in central attacking midfield. Quite simply Chelsea didn’t understand how to use him, hence why Arsenal supporters to this day — and neutrals for that matter — struggle to understand what Havertz is supposed to be.

At his best Havertz is a graceful and subtle player able to pop up unnoticed in positions to score or assist, amassing 29 goals and a further nine assists across 64 matches in his final two Bundesliga seasons.

It is these qualities that will have attracted Arteta to Havertz as an upgrade on Granit Xhaka’s unusual left-centre midfield role in 2022/23.

In his last season at the club, Xhaka scored seven Premier League goals and assisted seven more, up from one goal and two assists in each of the three league seasons preceding it.

The reason for that sudden upturn was a radically different role as a higher, wider, and underlapping midfielder, as evidenced in his numbers, recording significantly higher rates of touches, progressive passes and progressive passes received per 90 minutes.

That’s what Havertz is supposed to be doing this season: bursting ahead of Gabriel Martinelli and Eddie Nketiah, while also keeping the ball moving with quick interchanges of passes from Declan Rice out to the left side.

In other words, exactly the kind of ghosting-in that we saw at Bayer Leverkusen.

Early season struggles

So far, he is struggling to make it work.

Fabio Vieira came off the bench to play in Havertz’s position against both Fulham and Manchester United, excelling on each occasion and completely changing the makeup of the game (assisting a goal in both).

He is averaging 86.0 touches per 90 this season compared to Havertz’s 46.9 per 90, a significant indicator of how absent Havertz can seem.

Not that Havertz is without good moments. He had some nice touches against United and is skilled at helping his team retain possession and recycle it, while he also leads the Arsenal charts this season for fouls made (8) and fouls suffered (7), reflecting his hard pressing and feisty attitude.

He might go missing for stretches, but Havertz is not one to duck a challenge.

Things should improve significantly now that Gabriel Jesus is fit, because the Brazilian is far better than Nketiah at dropping deep to link the play, in turn freeing space for Havertz to make runs and link with Martinelli. Again, patience is required.

“The right side — Ben White, Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka — have been playing together forever,” Aaron Ramsdale told Sky Germany on Sunday.

“The left: Oleksandr Zinchenko, Kai Havertz, Gabriel Martinelli? Once. It takes time to build those connections.”

Time and, yes, confidence, something Havertz may only rediscover with the kind of persistence and determination that inspired Arteta’s courtship of his wife.

That, or a bit of luck.

On another day Havertz doesn’t miss that half volley, the penalty call isn’t overturned, and he is singled out as one of Arsenal’s most important players of Sunday’s match.

Until Havertz understands the tactical complexities of the unique left-sided role at Arsenal, and until by doing so he builds enough self-esteem to finish chances as he did in the Bundesliga, he will continue to be an enigma: tall but slight, aggressive but delicate, sharp but almost invisible.

Arteta has certainly earned Arsenal supporters’ faith that he is the right coach to locate the real Havertz, a man who frustrates precisely because he is such a contradictory character and so difficult to define.

Once those qualities are harnessed, however, it is not his own teammates who become bamboozled, who lose sight of the ghost, but the opponent.

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