Arsenal have suffered a glut of injuries to defenders in the first third of the season, but the one player that is yet to kick a ball is our captain Laurent Koscielny, who has had serious Achilles injuries over the last two seasons. There is a real possibility that he will never be able to take to the field again for the Gunners, according to sports physiotherapy expert Luke Anthony. He said on FootballLondon: “As you get older you recover less well,”
“Things just generally take a bit more time. So that is the biggest challenge he [Koscielny] will face from the injury.
“The second thing is the risk or re-rupture.
“There is a percentage of players who will re-rupture their repair at some stage.
“Generally they do it during the first six months and he must be coming through that now, so that risks reduced a little bit.
“Once you get through that the next challenge you have is to get back to your previous level and in his case this isn’t someone knocking it about in the lower leagues, this is a player playing top level Premier League football.
“So achieving that pre-injury level is very tough and it is a big challenge because you put stress on your body when it hasn’t been stressed like that for a long time.
“That’s when you see a lot of players pick up secondary injuries, whether it be a hamstring, groin or though injury.
“No matter how hard you try when you’re injured to keep your conditioning up, inevitably that will drop off and players will injure different body parts.”
It is a fact that we have many older defenders right now, so can we carry on hoping that we can patch together a back line in every game? Or should we make it a priority to buy another centre-back this January?