Hopefully the decision by Arsenal to appoint Shad Forsythe this summer as a new fitness and conditioning expert will pay off. He has a great reputation in football from his work with the Germany national team, but his work has not had the instant impact that us fans were hoping for, as the ever expanding injury list shows.
Players do get injured, we all know that, but for Arsene Wenger to deny that there is an underlying problem at the club and claim that our list of injuries this season is just a coincidence, as a Daily Mail report reveals, is either ignoring the facts staring you in the face or just an attempt to sidestep the issue in public.
And in the same interview, Wenger reveals that the knee problem picked up by Mesut Ozil that looks like keeping our record signing off the pitch for months, was known about at halftime in the match at Chelsea. So keeping the German midfielder on for the whole 90 minutes seems an incredible risk, especially as Ozil was not exactly setting the game on fire. What were Wenger and his medical team thinking?
The Frenchman said, “He had a little problem just before he went out at half-time. He had a little pain with his knee, he felt a crack.
“I said to our physio to keep an eye on him and if there was anything wrong with him, tell me because when you’re 1-0 down, you want to keep your offensive players on the pitch.
“I am deeply shocked. He wasn’t involved in a collision with anybody.
“It was just after making a pass with the outside of his foot that he injured his leg so it’s very hard to believe that you can damage your ligament with just making a simple pass and it’s very difficult to take that he will be out for a while.’
“I am not a great believer in coincidences but this time it really is coincidence.”
Really? I am no medical expert but I am not a financial expert either and even I know that if a business is losing money, they must be doing something wrong. There is an interesting piece by John Cross in The Mirror on Arsenal’s never ending problems with injury and he seems to lay a lot of the blame on the manager and his insistence on keeping a small squad and not signing suitable cover, which has left our defence stretched to breaking point already this season.
Do you believe that these problems are just a coincidence?