Arsenal are preparing for tonight’s League Cup game and, although we have great deep looking squad, there are still quite a lot of injury news to report. Wenger couldn’t give us an update on Matthieu Debuchy’s scan yet after he was taken off on Sunday after playing his first 16 minutes for a year, but everyone is expecting it to be a serious problem. “Mathieu has a scan today [Tuesday] but we don’t have the results yet,” Le Prof said.
Olivier Giroud is also out of the squad after a small hamstring pull, but that is not expected to be such a big problem and he probably wouldn’t have played tonight anyway, but his place in the squad will definitely be taken by the returning Lucas Perez, who hasn’t played since the last round of the League Cup five weeks ago. “Lucas is in the squad and will will have a mixture of youth and experience, but still 90 per cent of the first-team squad.” Wenger admitted.
We already know that Per Mertesacker and Danny Welbeck will not be available until January at the earliest, and that is probably going to be the same for Hector Bellerin who admitted this week that he likely to be another month away despite returning to training imminently. Bellerin said, “It’s going really good. Better than I expected. It is a hard injury to recover from and a bit painful.
“But I am going to try to be running from this week and hopefully I’ll be back on the pitch in less than four weeks.”
But with Debuchy out again, and with Jenkinson suddenly disappearing off the face of the Earth with no explanation whatsoever, I am fully expecting Maitland-Niles to be given another chance to impress in the right-back position this evening.
Worryingly there is still no news on a return date for Santi Cazorla and we had better get used to the fact that he won’t be playing much until the New Year either, but hopefully our squad depth will be good enough to cover and keep in touch until he returns to the team…. Fingers crossed!
Get well soon boys….
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