Tomorrow’s season opener at Selhurst Park will be the first game where Arsenal are allowed to have five substitutes and it is looking positive that Mikel Arteta could have the chance to give some minutes to our players returning from injury.
Last week he had four big players on the treatment table, namely Smith-Rowe, Tierney, Tomiyasu and Vieira, but after hearing earlier this week that ESR is unlikely to be available due to a groin strain, it appears that the other three could all be in the travelling party tomorrow if they can get through this afternoon’s training session.
Arteta told Football.London in his pre-game conference: “Three out of four are gonna be training this afternoon if everything goes well hopefully they are going to be in the squad,”
“Hopefully we are going to start to recover because they missed a lot of minutes and time in pre-season and they are really important players for us.”
The boss was particularly pressed on Tierney and Tomiyasu, who missed a large chunk at the end of last season, and he was asked if we could have the same problem in this campaign, and he responded: “Hopefully no and the reason they have those injuries are for different reasons and probably because the squad didn’t enable them to fully recover,”
“What I can tell you is that those two players are so willing to contribute to the team.”
Even if they train well this afternoon, I still think it is unlikely that any of them will start tomorrow, but if we can get a good lead, we may be able to see them play some cameos tomorrow.
Fingers crossed!
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