Rene Meulensteen told the Football Show on Sky Sports (03/02/21 at 10:25 am) that David Luiz is an ‘erratic’ player and his recent sending-off doesn’t surprise him even though he was ‘hard done by’.
The ex-Manchester United coach shared that they used to ‘set traps’ for the Arsenal defender to fall into during his days at Stamford Bridge – and it used to work.
Whilst the debate will rage as to whether Luiz deserved to be sent off against Wolves, no-one can argue about the way he unnerves his own fans with his style of defending.
Nonetheless, Meulensteen shared an interesting insight into Luiz as a player and the problems he has in his game.
“It’s not really a surprise for me that David Luiz does this,” said Meulensteen. “He’s got this in his game.
“He’s not a traditional centre-back. He’s a football-playing centre-back. But he’s a bit erratic.
“I always felt that when he still played for Chelsea, at the time, we almost used David Luiz to set up a trap because we knew that he was dragged into certain areas of the pitch.
“We knew that the decisions he would make on the ball that we could capitalise on, which we did. This is also part of the game. He plays on that fine line of making those sort of mistakes. But he was hard done by.”
Arsenal are now set to appeal Luiz’s red card, so that tells you how they feel about the incident.
It will be interesting if they are successful or not because, on top of him getting sent off, many Arsenal fans also felt that it wasn’t even a penalty.
Either way, if he isn’t available for Arsenal’s visit to Aston Villa on Saturday then a certain Gabriel will be, so some would argue that he should be playing ahead of the ex-Chelsea man.
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