Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang could benefit from time out of the Arsenal staring line-up to solve goalscoring woes, says Gunners legend Lee Dixon

Lee Dixon insists Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang should remain benched for Arsenal’s upcoming crunch games.

The Gunners, who are 15th place in the Premier League right now, face trips to relegation-threatened Brighton on Tuesday night before playing West Brom four days later.

Aubameyang was only fit enough for the bench due to a calf injury as he watched Arsenal beat Chelsea 3-1 on Boxing Day, claiming their first win in eight league matches.

The Arsenal captain has scored just five goals in all competitions so far this season, struggling to replicate his fine 2019/20 campaign in which he netted 29 times.

And Dixon, who won four league titles with Arsenal, believes the solution to Aubameyang’s poor form could be leaving him on the sidelines for a few weeks.

“Nobody is bigger than the club,” Dixon told Tuesday’s talkSPORT Breakfast. “And maybe Mikel Arteta might look at the game at the weekend and say, ‘we did create some chances, we did this’.

“It might just do him [Aubameyang] a bit of good to have a little step out of the team and just look from the sidelines.

“When you watch a game from the sidelines you can sometimes learn more than you do when you’re on the pitch.

“Your brain is so full of information when you’re playing; you don’t always see everything, you don’t always feel everything.

“Sometimes when you just step back and you sit on the bench for a bit and you look…

“He’s obviously a hugely talented footballer and we need his goals, but it might be a time for him just to look and assess the team.

“You can actually see little ways of improving your own game when you’re sitting on the bench, because you’re watching other people and you’re seeing gaps appear from a different angle.

“You go, ‘I can make that run next week’, or, ‘I know how the full-back does this’.

“When I was playing I didn’t analyse Ian Wright’s runs because they just happened.

“But if you were sitting on the sidelines and watched Thierry Henry or Wrighty or Dennis Bergkamp, you saw an awful lot more and it gives you a bigger and more colourful picture of that player.

“So it might do him a bit of good to step out.

“If they win their next two games and he doesn’t play then he [could] come back firing. That rest might do him good.”