Waiting and coping
Morning all.
After Tuesday’s win, we wait. Wait for news on Gabriel. Wait for news on Jurrien Timber. Wait for news on Ben White. Given the way this season has gone so far with regards injuries, you wouldn’t be at all surprised if the news was bad. Good news has been in short supply, so why would anything change now?
Even if, for all three, it was a question of weeks, it’d still be bad because time is tight and within that period we have to play two Champions League ties against a side with some of the most potent attacking talent in the world. Mikel Arteta was putting a brave face on things after the Fulham game, but inside he must be gutted/screaming/weeping – delete where appropriate.
The question about why we’ve had so many injuries is an obvious one, but one without an obvious answer. I think if it was really simple, we’d just fix it. Instead it’s a combination of factors, from playing time to the schedule that demands so much of players, to the intensity of how football is played these days, to some ill-fortune. Are our training pitches too hard? They weren’t last season. Did our medical and physio staff all graduate from the Dr Nick School of Muscley and Tendony Stuff? Clearly not.
Does it require some investigation? Absolutely, but while our issues are specific to us, I don’t think we’re unique in that we’ve suffered a lot of injuries this season. It’s been a significant factor for lots of teams in the Premier League this season, and around Europe too. And for me, there’s a kind of vicious circle at play. If you lose an important player, you need others to take up the slack, therefore you lean into the most reliable performers – usually your best players – and thus the burden on them becomes kind of relentless.
Fans talk all the time about how we need to rotate and protect players, and I completely get that. But, put yourself in the manager’s shoes for a day. You have to pick the team to play an important Premier League game – they’re all important, it’s just the degree of difficulty that changes a bit – and you’re sitting down to write the names on the teamsheet. You HAVE to win. You’ve got a big European game coming up the following midweek. You’ve had a hard game three days ago which required everyone to dig deep. The upcoming opposition are decent too. You feel like you’d like to give a couple of players a rest ahead of the Champions League tie but you need those three points.
After you jot down ‘David Raya’ in goal, are you brave enough to put out a central defensive partnership of Ben White and Jakub Kiwior to give the main men a rest, or do you, as I most certainly would, write William Saliba and Gabriel? Do you really go with Raheem Sterling on the right ahead of Bukayo Saka? No you don’t. You can make the solid argument that better squad building can alleviate the demands on some of these players, but you can’t have two Salibas and two Gabriels because players that good would be somewhere else playing first team football every week. Getting picked for every game because the best players play.
Are there things Mikel Arteta and other managers could probably do a bit better? Sure. I think perhaps this season is going to be one from which lessons need to be learned about squad depth and how you use players, but when it boils right down to it, most managers pick their best players the most often, and that goes from the top to the bottom of the league … every league, every manager. It’s more about how you cope with absences, and unfortunately for us, we’ve had a season where injuries have come in clusters.
The only ones that more or less came on their own were Martin Odegaard – when he suffered that ankle problem, an issue exacerbated by the fact we let Emile Smith Rowe and Fabio Vieira leave and had no cover; and Ben White requiring surgery in November. In that case, we had Jurrien Timber who has done a great job, but maybe he too has now fallen victim to the physical demands placed on him as the only available right back.
The Saka/Jesus/Havertz/Martinelli cluster happened around the end of 2024/early 2025, and that basically cost us our chance of the title; and if we’re going into the Real Madrid games without White, Timber, Gabriel and Calafiori (as well as Takehiro Tomiyasu whose absence is a little more distinct but still a factor), it’s hard not to fear that it’ll be part of why we struggle to get beyond the quarter-finals. In both those instances, our ability to cope with injury has been diminished massively.
Losing Gabriel alone would have been a huge blow, but with the others full fit you’d be confident you could cope to an extent. Without them, if that is the case, it’s gonna be a massive, massive challenge. So, let’s wait and see, keep fingers crossed and all the rest, and we might get an update at some point today or in Arteta’s press conference tomorrow.
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A final thing for today, and it’s something I’ve written about more than once this season, not just about incidents involving Arsenal either. Once again VAR and PGMOL abjectly failed to do their job properly last night in the Merseyside derby. James Tarkowski absolutely should have seen red for a brutal and unnecessary challenge on Alexis Mac Allister.
I know he played the ball first but there’s no need for him to follow through the way he did. It was dangerous, reckless, endangered the opponent, and he got just a yellow card. Maybe it’s one of those where maybe the ref doesn’t see it well enough, but that’s what VAR is for and once more they pay short shrift to violent conduct and let him away with it.
PGMOL’s track record with incidents like this cannot be a coincidence, it’s got to be policy, and it’s just not good enough. When they’re happy throw around red cards that aren’t red cards or second yellows for trivial nonsense, but fail to officiate the game properly when it comes to incidents like this, then questions have to be asked. Unfortunately, those questions keep getting ignored, and it’ll probably only take a very serious injury for others to sit up and take notice. What a shame.
Right, I’ll leave it there for this morning. Have a good one folks.
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