Mesut Özil Is the Last Virtuoso the Premier League Has to Offer

English football, and England generally, has always been suspicious of the virtuoso. If ever there were formed, as seems increasingly likely, Khmer Rouge-style death squads to round up and purge this country of its overly finessed artists, experts and intellectuals, we all know in this modern age who the unlucky ones would be.

Bring out the Latin speakers, the ballet boys, the gastropub quiz winners. Here come the steampunks, chased screaming from their hiding place by Graeme Souness, the kind of man who buys a bag-for-life for his banana in case passersby think he’s walking home to put it up his anus. Here come the zoo-keepers, the tote bag wearers and the people who can still write with pens, traipsing along in their manacles at the behest of purge-leader alpha and human burger van Sam Allardyce. The pint of wine jokes. They are incredibly tedious now. But you do wonder what else Allardyce has tried to totally de-feminise by putting it in something that feels reassuringly manly to him. Sam Allardyce’s flagon of flowers. Sam Allardyce's Madonna-bra man cave. Sam Allardyce's JCB shovel of Sex in the City boxsets. Sam Allardyce’s bottomless brunch, which is just him eating a plate of sausages without any trousers on. Sam Allardyce's sexy Adam Ant Halloween costume: stand, and eat liver, your money or your tripe.

All of which seems quite unfair, doesn't it, on Sam Allardyce and intellectuals alike. Death squads do none of us any favours, and besides, once you've started, where do you stop? Every country, every community, every office, even, has its own relative bright sparks, people whose acumen and clear-eyed ability to manoeuvre the world in their direction ultimately shines through. In the studio that houses TalkSport's drive-time show, for instance, the intellectual is the one who can take a shit without cracking their teeth on the porcelain, the artist is the one who makes necklaces out of broken teeth and the expert is the only one with any teeth left, a painful private hell of dental scarcity that presumably explains why there's been little to no chatter from that corner of the footballing galaxy about Mesut Özil's virtuoso performance against Leicester City on Monday night.

To give this stupid, petty little country some credit, Özil's performance really did seem to capture the imagination of the English public, and not in a way that suggests they might want to lynch him, or anyone else for that matter, any time soon. It's not often that a player can play so well that fans of other teams will publicly admit to being impressed, but all across the internet the usual furious tribal shit-fits and schadenfreude took a night off and praise was showered down upon Arsenal’s strange child prince of a number ten, a player who seems, under this new manager, like he might finally have been tickled and slapped in just the right amounts for us to see the best of him.

Which isn't to say Özil had a great game. Not exactly: for 40 minutes he was barely there, struggling to get on the ball and, when he did, to find any human contact up ahead of him, though there was something about his body language that did suggest he could be in the mood if the lighting was just right, if sufficiently appealing spaces could be detected in enemy territory, if the Emirates crowd – so desperate for a totemic on-pitch hero to go with their office stories and Fruit Pastilles – could chirpse him into it. And then, on the stroke of half time, Özil simply exploded, deciding that this game was one that should be marked by what from him was a rare but beguiling alloy of leadership and fantasy, a performance that felt like watching a child's magician taking charge of an emergency fire drill. The parts he played in the first and third goals have been dissected enough this week; it was the pass for the second that will endure in time as true genius, a miracle of vanishing angles that anaesthetised four Leicester defenders simultaneously, leaving Héctor Bellerín with the task of squaring for Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to tap into a gaping net.

Beyond his on-pitch brilliance, you suspect there are other factors at play in this week's prolonged veneration of Özil, a desire to see more virtuoso performances in a Premier League campaign that so far has produced a dearth. In a division so super-charged with star power, the reasons for this feel strangely easy to detect; the protagonists who offered them up so regularly last season have thus far failed to fire, Harry Kane and Mo Salah weirdly muted and fatigued, arch scruff-grabber Kevin de Bruyne – a man who, if he weren't the world's best central midfielder, looks like he might spend his time literally lifting puppies out of a sack by their neck fat to sell in pub car parks – AWOL with injury.

There is also the fact that these days the system, not the soloist, appears to be king. For years, Özil's chance creation and assist stats have been invoked by Arsenal fans desperate to prove that the German isn't a slightly wafty maestro who often goes missing just when his team need him most. This in itself feels a touch disingenuous now, when so many chances arrive as a result of heavy team pressing high up the pitch rather than the mind of some central creative force, and assist stats remain something you can't share out around a hunting pack, an example of the game overtaking the gauge.

As such, it can be comforting to know that Özil is one player who still has virtuosity in his locker, the last pure number ten conducting play for a side in the Big Six. The hope for Arsenal fans – and who knows, maybe a few of the other people praising him this week – is that Özil can "kick on" from here, even if this is a man who, during his years in England, has seemed weirdly resistant to the idea of kicking on, almost as though he's terrified of the potential backlash that kicking on might incite – those bloody virtuosos, coming over here with their omniscient vision and their heel-flicks, doing things no one else on the pitch can.

For now, maybe we can take succour and courage from the sense that those death-squad days are falling away from us, the alpha male workhorses of Souness and Allardyce's era gradually being eased out of the critical firmament by the likes of Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand, Golden Generation voices that can talk with real authority about being Premier League footballers. One a Latin speaker, the other a ballet boy, both offering hope that England might one day be a stupid, petty little country that at least doesn't torture its geniuses.

@hydallcodeen