Although it' aa few months old, this suggests Ozil isn' a la as people think he is.
http://www.skysports.com/football/n...fair-the-stats-on-his-arsenal-role-and-record
This is BS 'journalism', you're basically buying a story written by his agent.
He's not lazy, no one ever basically accuses him of being lazy. People accused him of being mostly just crap against tough opposition in the first 18 months at Arsenal. In the first 6 months, new team only a few big games that can be put down to needing time to adjust to players, team, style, league, but after a year he'd been through shocking european performances, bad performances against tougher opposition with better midfielders giving him less space and the games he barely tries.
SPrints, runs, distance covered on average doesn't account for specific games and don't really tell anyone anything.
The media (almost certainly done via a push from his agent/pr people) decided to immediately make all that just people calling him lazy, then proceeded to prove he wasn't lazy via distance covered. The thing about Ozil is when he needs to close someone down, just like Walcott does so often, where Sanchez and Wilshere types would run fast to close down the space then get really close and get within 1 ft of intercepting the ball, Ozil will jog over but stop 3m short and never come close to intercepting the ball or making a tackle.
Distance covered and sprint would be almost identical in both cases but the intensity, the intention and the end result is different. Watch Ozil close down in any game compared to others, it's slower and it's almost always 'for show' where he nearly never shows any actual intention to win the ball. When Sanchez would run at you, you had players turning around and finding a pass they don't want. When it's Ozil they aren't scared of him, they stand there, Ozil stops and they look for the pass they want or just run around him with no real fight.
His quality, the intensity of his game and his effectiveness drops to near pointless levels in probably 60-70% of the toughest games and he's almost always the first to go missing in the round of 16 in the CL. You pay the best players the most because they bring their A game to those toughest games much more often than an average player, not much less.
Laziness isn't the issue, it was never the issue, it was never an accusation. When people attacked his quality, media reframed it as people accusing him of being lazy because the media felt they could use stupid stats to disprove that.
