Last weekend was not a good one for Arsenal, with a terrible 3-0 defeat to Crystal Palace and Kieran Tierney being ruled out ahead of the game. The Scotsman has since had an operation on his knee and will not be playing again this season.
Then it got worse when Thomas Partey pulled up with yet another thigh injury as well, and after tests, Mikel Arteta is now worried that the Ghanaian will also miss the rest of the season. “It’s a little bit ambiguous but he has a significant injury and we’ll have to keep assessing him,” Arteta told the Guardian. “He will be out for some weeks. It could be [that he can play again this season] but it could not be the case, because it’s an area where he had a previous injury as well and he felt it straightaway. He’s not fit.”
Thomas has not been having the best of luck with injuries since joining Arsenal, and it is extremely worrying that he keeps getting recurring problems, just like Tierney in fact, and to lose both of them right now with many crucial fixtures ahead of us could be a real setback in our hopes of securing Champions League football next season.
It doesn’t help that not many Arsenal fans have faith in Nuno Tavares and Albert Sambi Lokonga, who are likely to be the replacements for Tierney and Partey against Brighton. Surely we should be able to cope with the out-of-form Seagulls, but we have much harder tests coming up in the weeks ahead…
Lokonga played well when he came on
And on previous occasions Palmer17
It got lost because of the noise around the loss but I thought he had a superb League debut performance against Brentford amongst some really difficult circumstances and had a good run in the side for a while
Partey has only really shown his class consistently in the last half a dozen games or so, we will miss that for sure but I believe that young Sambi is a fine player in the making and will play well against a decent midfield today with Xhaka sitting a bit deeper behind him
ASL could be a possible replacement for Partey, but I worry about Tavares on the LB side. Arteta might play White as RB with Holding as CB so that Cedric plays as LB, since he can play both full back positions. We have got to win this game at all costs.
Tavares will be fine gunnerforlife, no need to completely rearrange the whole of a back 4 that has been pretty solid for a while now just because one of them is now injured in my opinion
In terms of winning the game that will be about whether we can convert chances or not again rather than a replacement left back, again my opinion
I believe we will do both today
FF YOU HAVE MORE BLIND FAITH in Tavares than most Gooners do, myself very much included.
I do not see him as a defender at all but think he is better going forward. But in no way a proper sub for Tierney , not now, not ever ,IMO.