Big-game player? Bayern showdown holds key to Mesut Ozil redemption

It was one of the darkest nights of his Arsenal career. Eight minutes into the first leg of a Champions League last-16 fixture against Bayern Munich in 2014 and Mesut Ozil’s awful penalty was batted away with contemptuous ease by Manuel Neuer.

Ozil subsequently disappeared from view, retreating to the margins of a match which Bayern dominated to an obscene degree after a red card to Wojciech Szczesny to win 2-0. Pep Guardiola’s side set a new Champions League record for pass accuracy as the impotent, listless Ozil watched the match pass him by and did nothing about it.

On Tuesday night Bayern Munich return to Emirates Stadium in the first of two back-to-back group-stage games which could effectively eliminate Arsenal. You might expect Ozil to cower at the thought, remembering his past indiscretion and the daunting strength of the opponents.

This is the Bayern Munich of Robert '15 goals in six games’ Lewandowski; the Bayern Munich who have won 12 of 12 matches in all competitions this season; the Bayern Munich who have undergone such profound Pepification that centre-back Jerome Boateng was spotted producing two sublime assists in their 5-1 destruction of Borussia Dortmund at the start of October (even if they weren’t exactly passes out of the Guardiola playbook).

But no, not a hint of it. "We're playing at home,” Ozil said in quotes reported recently. “We certainly have respect for Bayern but we're not afraid of them. We know how to score goals against Bayern and can be successful. It will be difficult but we have the potential to beat any team … we have a super team with a lot of world-class players.”

The reason for this eruption in belief is surely the manner of Arsenal’s memorable win over Manchester United before the international beak, when they tore their opponents apart in the first half and put the pieces in a box in the second on the way to a 3-0 victory. Notably for such a game of such importance, Ozil excelled.

After six minutes he had played a clever one-two with Aaron Ramsey before setting up Alexis Sanchez for a sublime backheel for the opening goal. Little over a minute later it was a one-two with Theo Walcott, but this time Ozil was the player to find the back of the net, guiding the ball past a wrong-footed David de Gea with his instep. It was his most decisive performance yet in an Arsenal shirt.

He again excelled as the Gunners overcame Watford last weekend by the same score.

Ozil’s record in big games is, however, a matter of perpetual and vigorous debate. The German has never been able to shake suggestions that he can shrink in matches of major importance, and even if his is a more subtle and often under-appreciated talent, it is surely true that he could have imposed himself more on such occasions.

Just weeks after that penalty miss against Bayern, one newspaper article carried the rather infamous headline: ‘Lost and lazy Ozil might have cost Arsenal £42.5m but he isn't worth two-bob... and he's nicking a living’. Weak performances in the 6-3 defeat to Manchester City and 5-1 loss to Liverpool were cited in defence of this rather hysterical argument.

But it was not only the Daily Mail who questioned Ozil’s worth in the opening months of 2014, when his form struggled to hold up after a hectic winter. Respected magazine kicker carried a feature about Ozil on the front page prior to Germany’s friendly with Chile, bearing the headline: ‘The Ozil debate: is he one for the big games?’

It is not a question that the 27-year-old was able to answer definitively in 2014-15. The debate is still a live one. But the performance against United weighed down rather heavily on one side of the argument, and if Ozil can follow it up with a display to erase the memory of that missed penalty and subsequent disappearing act against Bayern, then the asterisk next to his name might start to be gently erased.