I know that there has already been a post on the Just Arsenal website about the latest injury update on our star striker Alexis Sanchez. To a certain extent I also agree about the theory that, despite what Arsene Wenger said about the club being careful, the Chilean will probably be thrown straight back into the starting line up for the crunch clash with Premier League rivals Man City on Monday.
To be honest, though, I reckon that Alexis will be fit and ready to play by then anyway, even though the boss said that he was not back in full training yet. He did say that the striker was running again and as he has only been out of action for a couple of weeks or so, how long is it likely to take for him to be match fit?
One part of what Wenger said about Alexis, as reported by The Guardian, has given us some food for thought, because the boss suggested that he would no longer be taking this particular player’s word on whether he was okay to play or not. After the Chilean apparently insisted he was fine before hurting his hamstring against Norwich City, it was not hard to work out who the Frenchman was talking about when he was asked whether he trusted all of his Gunners to tell the complete truth about their fitness.
Wenger replied, “Not all of them. I don’t mean this in a negative way. Some of them are so keen to forget that they have pain somewhere that they say they are all right, when they are not.
“You know the players and their psychological profile, you take that into account and then you get scientific advice. You trust your gut, as well, and then you make a decision.
“It’s a compliment [to Sánchez]. You want everybody to absolutely want to play. We have shown again recently with Olympiakos and with Aston Villa that we have fantastic mentality in the team and these players are something special on the human front. I hope that in the longer term, in the championship, that will come out. Will I make the decision rather than Alexis? Yes. Because he says he’s always ready.”
So have Wenger and the Arsenal medical team learned a valuable lesson about super Sanchez?