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How do Arsenal plan to resolve Aubameyang’s goal crisis?

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Arsenal
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Aubameyang drew another blank in Arsenal’s defeat to Aston Villa, leaving Arteta with some heavy thinking to do over the international break.

The stats aren’t a pretty sight at the moment, with just two goals on Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s account after eight Premier League games.

The Arsenal skipper’s struggles on the front end of the pitch have come under the spotlight recently. His recent drought in the league is the worst of his Gunners career. It’s led to questions over his role and even professionalism.

There was hope that Auba’s match-winning penalty against Manchester United recently would spark a turnaround in form.

But another disappointing display followed in Arsenal’s 3-0 defeat to Aston Villa at the Emirates. The visitors had him covered out on the left-wing to restrict his movements throughout the game. In fact, he rarely saw any significant action at all.

WhoScored stats showed Aubameyang didn’t manage a single shot, while fellow forwards Alexandre Lacazette registered one and Willian did two. Even substitute forwards Eddie Nketiah (1) and Nicolas Pepe (2) challenged the Villa goal.

This turn of events will no doubt lead to more calls for Aubameyang to replace the struggling Lacazette in a central role.

“We certainly are getting in some situations,” said Mikel Arteta on a potential positional change for Aubameyang as quoted on Arsenal.com.

“But the end product is something we have to improve and about the position and his movement and where we can find him, of course we can talk about is this the right or wrong place for him, but when things were working and he was scoring that debate wasn’t there.”

The Arsenal boss added: “What is certain is that with these numbers, scoring this amount of goals is impossible to fight with the top teams so we have to maintain the numbers we have defensively in our organization.

“For sure we have to improve our numbers attacking-wise if we want to be challenging and if you want to be consistent in winning football matches.”

Aubameyang’s woes have coincided with Arsenal’s own goal struggles, having failed to score in three of their last four Premier League games.

Failing to find the back of the net against Villa leaves the Gunners on just nine goals in their opening eight Premier League games – their lowest haul at this stage of a season since 1998/99.

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