There are few things in life as pleasing as an a-ha moment.

It’s that moment where everything else fades away and we gain total insight; whether it’s the discovery that Verbal Kint made the whole thing up or that special realization that the moon is, in fact, not made of cheese – the a-ha moment feels good.

We like knowing.

It’s one of those things that makes magic so entertaining, we see something we can’t often explain and we’re driven to understand it in order to find that a-ha moment.  In today’s society, where we are increasingly determined to figure out how things work, we miss that magic sometimes.  We have stats and science and Google to tell us exactly how things are done – the a-ha moment is becoming excruciatingly elusive.

Magicians know about this phenomenon.  They understand this human drive to seek out clean explanations that reveal all secrets and they’ve elegantly engineered a solution into how magic tricks are designed to avoid people sharing their secrets.

There is only one secret in magic – the secret must be ugly.

If you design a magic trick, the secret must be so nasty, so convoluted and pedestrian, that revealing it does not result in an a-ha moment.  It is almost always fabricated using a series of less glamourous things, orchestrated together with thought and guile.  This is how magic tricks predominantly stay secret – we are less likely to share the trick if the explanation takes ten minutes to describe and involves many ridiculous and non-complex steps.

Think about it like this: if I were to make my assistant disappear in a trick on stage, and you asked me how I did it, and my explanation involved a guy under the stage with a small trap door which while he opened it, I had a mirror propped on stage which held at an angle hid the door being open and then my assistant had practiced all her life on squeezing through that tiny door and then I distracted you with my cape…blah, blah, blah – sooner or later you’re going to understand how I did it but you aren’t going to care anymore because the secret was so completely void of any cleverness and ingenuity that the result was a total absence of an a-ha moment.

At Arsenal, we have a magician – a brilliant one.  Mesut Özil came with a reputation of being able to pull off the seemingly impossible; to produce mastery on the field at will, but that mastery came with a price – his secret is ugly.

Born in Gelsenkirchen and the grandson of a Turkish immigrant, Özil’s early life could easily be that of a fictional vaudevillian showman.  Imagine being raised in a monkey cage – that fenced in football pitch in an industrial city reserved for the neighbourhood children to perfect their skills – both with and without the football.  It gives the impression of a brutality that would have shaped young Mesut’s approach to the beautiful game; playing against other children who were bigger and older than the quiet and aloof German.

Fenced in, the only survival would be perfection.  By all accounts, Özil fervishly pursued mastery of the sport which masked the reality of a surrounding city whose mining heritage had slowly been taken over by unemployment.

His first formal footballing experience would come at the local sports club, DJK Westphalia where he was enrolled at the age of seven.  Next it would be Rot-Weiss Essen followed by Schalke before a move to Werder Bremen materialized after an acrimonious split from his hometown club.

While he’d represented Germany at several stages, it was the chilling man-of-the-match destruction of England in the final of the 2009 European Under-21 Championship which announced Özil to the World.  A year later and he found himself heading to Real Madrid in a big money move producing the odd dichotomy of an introverted Galactico.

Perhaps Madrid was the best place for him.  In that team, he found a cast of the world’s best performers – there was no one to tarnish his supreme skill and his magic could flourish.  But like any travelling spectacle, the acts must ultimately change and Özil found himself a victim of a fickle Madrista circus where he wasn’t the headline act.

At Arsenal, Özil is the headline act.  Alexis has gone some way to temper that expectation but Arsenal are not Madrid.  The polish and flair of one of Europe’s most successful clubs was replaced by the weight of burgeoning expectation and Özil’s contemporaries pale in comparison to the likes of Ronaldo and Benzema.

In football, his talent of pure perfection is sullied by the other players around him: he’s faced with the awkward paradox of being an individual genius restricted by the bounds of a team sport.  Even more detrimental to his reputation is that he is an introvert in a sport (and league) that favours extroverts.

I can picture Mesut Özil locked away in a derelict Victorian theatre, scrambling to perfect his act in a brooding silence only broken by his own mad mutterings – scheming, furrowed brow, over a cluttered table – hunched back – deliberating with his own virtuoso. He strikes me as a misunderstood genius and a ruminating introvert – a man obsessed by perfection in his own methods.  Over and over he tries to pull off the ultimate spectacle, only to be let down by the unadventurous around him.

Consider the oft touted chances created statistic – as of mid-September, Özil had created the most goal-scoring chances in the Premier League for 2015 at 76*  and is no doubt a major reason Arsenal lead Europe in the 5 Major Leagues in total shots this year.  Özil himself has created a phenomenal 29 chances this season but only has 3 assists – the magic is there.

Leaving aside the cold systemic calculation of statistics, and there’s a deeply emotive response to Mesut Özil.  When we simply stop trying to explain his greatness and watch with the wonder of an audience that is willing to be dazzled, his truth elegantly emerges from the false chrysalis of his detractors.

The sleight of hand of a dropped shoulder, the misdirection of a faked pass – all of it part of a broader masterpiece playing out each week at auditoria across the land.  We are an audience who fight a conflicting duality between wanting to be entertained and needing to know how it’s done – the ugly secret.

Perhaps that is the point of Mesut Özil: just when you think he’s done nothing, the realization dawns on you that he’s almost done it all – he’s been keeping us all busy with his right hand while his left hand systematically performed the real magic.  While we strive to explain the simple sleight of hand, we miss the wonder of the overall trick and in that instant we discover that while we’ve been robbed of the a-ha moment, a new appreciation takes its place – Mesut is magnificent.

YOUKNOWIT!

Other Geoff

*Statistics cited in this article were sourced from premierleague.com and squawka.com.