So Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is a bit of a maverick, is he?
‘A little bit woah, a little bit waaay’, as Chris the Cockney used to say on The Fast Show.
He loves his clobber, loves his fast cars… and when he’s scoring goals he’s a saint, but when he isn’t things can go a bit wobbly.
I’m mean, come on, tell us something we didn’t know.
Four or five years ago, I remember going to see Aubameyang in Dortmund to make a programme about him wearing diamond-encrusted boots, driving his gold Ferrari and this, that and the other.
His character was already well known and loved throughout the game, so it’s not as if Arsenal weren’t well aware of what they were getting — a flash Harry goalscorer — when they bought him.
What they weren’t getting was someone who was captain material and he should never have been given the job in the first place.
If you’re a manager and you want to keep the heat away from yourself you don’t give the captaincy to a player who might turn up late or not at all because, ultimately, that isn’t going to reflect well on you.
Look, I know Mikel Arteta inherited him as skipper from Unai Emery.
But the Arsenal boss has been in football long enough to know that if you make a maverick player your captain you can expect to get your fingers burnt at any given moment.
At any time since he took over two years ago, Arteta could have given the captaincy to Ben White or Aaron Ramsdale, someone like that.
I don’t know much about either away from football, I don’t know if they drive Teslas or a Mini Metros.
But what I do know is that they’re not turning up in gold-wrapped Lambourghinis and that tells me something about their personalities straight away.
When I was at Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, I missed training a few times and, quite rightly, I got hauled over the coals for it.
But at Forest I was doing the business every week, so no one really gave a damn, and at Liverpool I was doing it most of the time so it didn’t come back to haunt me.
The simple fact is, though, that I wouldn’t have been expected to be club captain or a real force in the dressing-room anyway because that’s the Holy Grail.
The captain is the first in and last out, he’s the one with the bag of balls, the teacher’s pet etc.
And none of us would think Aubameyang would fit that cookie-cutter, would we?
This whole situation, then, just feed into what I’ve thought about Arteta for a while now.
He’s a nice bloke who wants to get the ball down like Pep Guardiola and create a functioning Arsenal team that plays quality football.
But if he really had something about him, he wouldn’t have missed an issue as obvious as having Auba as his captain in the first place.
