Arsenal’s incredible history of injury problems continues as usual with Laurent Koscielny and Alexis Sanchez being taken off during the Norwich game, but it has now been revealed that Santi Cazorla also sustained a knee ligament injury right at the start of the second half, but he was forced to continue playing right until the end of the game.
After the game, Wenger admitted that he knew about the problem saying that Cazorla played the second half “on one leg” and also that “The worrying thing was that it got worse,”. Now farbeit for me to tell Wenger how to do his job, but I can’t stop asking myself why Le Prof didn’t try and mimimize the risk by taking Cazorla off when it was obvious that it was far from being a minor problem.
Yes we all know that Wenger hates making substitutions before the 60th minute unless forced to and he had already put Gabriel on for Koscielny early in the game, but can anyone explain why the Boss didn’t move Ramsey into the middle and bring on Campbell for the right wing?
Campbell actually did come on when Alexis pulled his hamstring, strangely enough in the 60th minute, but Cazorla was still left hobbling around in the middle of the park….
Ten minutes later Wenger then made the tactical change of removing Ramsey and putting the Ox on to try and grab the winner, but surely it must have been blindingly obvious by then that Cazorla was incapable of influencing the game ad in grave danger of making his injury worse, and again Ramsey should have moved to the middle and Cazorla should have been the player leaving the pitch…
I remember not so long ago that Cazorla was dizzy and unbalanced from the start against Tottenham. Again Wenger was aware of it and had Matthieu Flamini warming up for most of the first half, but Le Prof refused to take Santi off the pitch until half-time, but by then we had already allowed Spurs to go 1-0 ahead.
So why does Wenger continue to leave Cazorla on the pitch when injured, but take other players off at the slightest twinge?