Arsenal fans panic as Mesut Özil is absent from team photo…but there’s a good reason

It's not like football fans to overreact to an innocuous detail from a team photo.

Wait, let us try that again. It's entirely like football fans to overreact to an innocuous detail from a team photo. Arsenal midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain shared this photo of the Gunners squad enjoying a meal out, but someone's missing. https://twitter.com/Alex_OxChambo/status/824004160492359680 Mesut Özil is nowhere to be seen in the photo, and  - while Santi Cazorla and Shkodran Mustafi are also absent, as well as Mohamed Elneny, away on AFCON duty with Egypt - that didn't stop fans going into panic mode about one man and one man only. https://twitter.com/SimplyOxlade/status/824004268520771584 https://twitter.com/jesscampbellftw/status/824004296006057988 https://twitter.com/EhabJohnson/status/824009762278871040 https://twitter.com/Luke_Rice8/status/824004992105381888 Still, at least some of the responses were more tongue-in-cheek. https://twitter.com/MOliverFan/status/824005174196899840 https://twitter.com/EalZed_19/status/824007095242620931 Perhaps it was Oxlade-Chamberlain's way of trolling his own club's fans after they jumped the gun over reported transfer target Riyad Mahrez sitting out a Leicester City photoshoot over the summer. Or maybe it was much more innocuous than that - after all, Özil had a perfectly good reason for not being with his teammates. The German is in the Swedish city of Göteborg, with Metro reporting that the former Real Madrid man has been given a short break by manager Arsène Wenger. It is unclear whether Özil will return in time for Saturday's FA Cup fourth round trip to Southampton.