The one weakness Arsenal has had over the last few seasons is our defence, with our propensity to let in ridiculous goals for no reason at all by silly mistakes by our unconfident defenders. Unai Emery addressed this in the summer (or our management team did) by bringing in Sokratis and Lichtsteiner and of course promoting Rob Holding and Dino Mavropanos to the first team.
Admittedly it hasn’t worked out brilliantly yet, with Arsenal already having conceded 15 goals compared to Man City and Liverpool’s 5 (and Chelsea’s 8) but we do seem to be going in the right direction now, although we’ve still only had two clean sheets in the League this season.
But it looks like our captain Laurent Koscielny is now approaching fitness and will be ready to compete for a first team place. Emery said today: “He started to train with us, every day, one month ago,” our head coach said. “The process with him in this international break is to finish training with us every day to start playing, little by little.
“First, our idea is to start with the under-23s, but also, these two weeks training with us, I am looking at him. He is well, with good performances, good feeling and I think he, today, is close to also playing with us.
“But the first idea is, and maybe on Monday, he can play with the under-23s. We are going to decide tomorrow the plan with him, but we are thinking for him to start to take minutes.”
I can see him starting off with games in the Caraboa Cup and the Europa League, but with the loads of options that we now have in defence, what is the honest chances of Kos the Boss coming back and playing regularly in the first team?
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