All Arsenal fans are up in arms about the Gunners dropping two points at Norwich yesterday, and even worse we have sustained three more injuries to key players that we can ill afford to do without right now. Arsene Wenger felt that Norwich played a defensive game and deserved the point.
Le Prof told Arsenal.com: “…..It was a difficult game. We played against a Norwich side that was at the top level physically and focused. They were well organised and they played every time with 10 players in their own half, and we were not incisive enough. Maybe the turning point of the game was maybe we dropped a little bit after scoring straight away and allowed them back into the game.
“In the second half I felt we had to dig deep to get though as we were a bit jaded and we lost players. Cazorla played on one leg and of course we played Kosicelny at the start of the game so it was, I would say, a fair point for Norwich and it was on the injury front a bad afternoon for us.”
Wenger is very worried that the injuries suffered by Alexis, Koscielny and Cazorla could be serious, but he certainly does not think they were caused by being overplayed. He said: “You have plenty of players across Europe who play every single game and at the moment we are short as Walcott is not there, Welbeck is not there, Oxlade-Chamberlain is just coming back. I can take a gamble on one and in case I can take a gamble on another one.”
He thinks that Cazorla’s injury could be bad and he was asked who he will now play in that position in the meantime. He said: “We have Ramsey. I can understand you worry for us, but trust us, we will be there.”
So Ramsey got back just in time, and he is happy that has now got some game time, although he also thought that Norwich deserved the draw. “It was good to be back out here and to get some minutes under my belt,” he said. “Hopefully I can get a few more games under my belt to get my fitness levels back up.
“It was obviously a bit disappointing to go a goal up and to concede that goal was a bit disappointing from our view, but to be fair they did well and they deserved to get a point out of the game. We just will have to up our game in our next match.
“They didn’t make it easy for us. They played a few long balls at times and it was difficult to get he ball down and get our pressing on but they did really well and probably a draw was a fair result.
“Every game is important at the moment, it is so tight so we don’t want to drop any points. We don’t want to have to play catch up but we will see at the end of the season and we will want to bounce back and get back to winning ways on Saturday.”
Arsenal are definitely going through a blip at the moment with just two draws from three games, but Wenger says that this is normal for all teams and we have ended up quite lucky as we are sill ony two points away from the top of the table. He concluded: “We have to go through that spell. We had a bad spell of a few games now with Tottenham, West Brom and today we only have taken two points but we are still not far and going through a bad spell and not being far. It is not enough but at least we had an opportunity to come back.”
So we now have a week for our players to recover before facing Sunderland, but we will be waiting nervously to find out the scan results on our newly injured, so let’s just keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best…..