It is definitely becoming too much of a habit lately as it looks like another Arsenal player gets injured in every single game we play at the moment. The latest addition is the Armenian Henrik Mhkitaryan, who fractured his metatarsal in the League cup game against Tottenham. He is not expected to return to full training for six weeks at least.
Nacho Monreal has also been put back on the list with a recurrence of his hamstring but hopefully will be back soon, while Shkodran Mustafi is taking longer than expected to recover from his own hamstring problem. Hopefully he will return to training soon.
Hector Bellerin’s calf injury means he is not expected to return to full training in two weeks.
Our new young star Emile Smith Rowe has a problem with his hip and should be back in training soon as well, and the new defender Dinos Mavropanos is taking ages to recover from his groin injury and really should have been back by now. We really could do with a defender back soon!
And of course we have poor Rob Holding and Danny Welbeck out for the season.
So, yet again, we will have very few defenders for Brighton and it will probably be Laurent Koscielny and Sokratis in the middle with Kolasinac and Lichtsteiner on the flanks, unless Emery decides to use Maitland-Niles as wing back. That is every single one of our defensive options at the moment, and with games coming every three days they cannot all play in every game, especially Koscielny….