Around 15 games into the season and half the Arsenal squad is injured already? by KM
Okay, so whats up lately? We car-crashed out of the CoC, but there is a bigger issue. Just look at the injury list of outfield players. Jack Wilshere, Danny Welbeck, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Aaron Ramsey, Theo Walcott, Mikel Arteta and Tomas Rosicky.
The injuries of Theo and the Ox were a highlight of poor medical decisions. Same with Ramsey. But it’s not just that, those players are regularly injured. Even if they all have the talent of Messi, if they don’t play they aren’t worth anything.
Why did we keep Arteta? I mean he gave us two good seasons, I appreciate him, but if we have title aspirations he just doesn’t fit the bill. He doesn’t have the legs, and he is injury prone. At 30+ Wenger used to give players not more than a one year extension and that made players better than Arteta leave us in the past. What changed now?
Same question goes to Flamini, who despite his 2 goals against Spurs, fails to impress me as a DM. And at that age he is not getting any better too. I really feel sad for Rosicky too, who wanted to leave, will probably play ZERO games for us and we are wasting one of the last years of his career.
Then we get to the even more painful part of the “British core”, that cannot sustain 5 games together. Theo was just deployed as our main striker, now he’ll miss three games of huge importance to our entire season. He is one of the top 3 earners and the club, but if he cannot get at least 30 games a season, his goal return is unlikely to reach 20.
The Ox is another one full of potential, but when he is on the brink of getting into the squad, he’s out again, and when Ramsey comes back, there will be no place for Alex. But Aaron himself is a painful topic. We saw glimpses of his talent 2 seasons back, but his injury then cost us a downfall and he’s out again now.
We’ll be hoping to survive our next three games, without being out of the UCL and 5-6 points behind City in the league table. The question is why didn’t we foresee this in the summer? Why didn’t we ship out the players that don’t cut it for fresh replacements?
We don’t want 30 million players all the time. Coquelin cost nothing and we all love him. Why didn’t Wenger sit down with the medical team and look at what they think about how much each player should be played?
Giroud played 2-3 seasons as our only striker and he’s rarely injured. Alexis is immensely overplayed, yet he is still playing every game. Santi is 31 and he’s playing all the games too. I mean work with the players fitness and try to balance it out, or bring in replacements for when moments like this happen.
Last year, we finished the season strong, because we had a fully fit squad. We had options, but now who’s gonna play on the right against Swansea? Campbell? We’ll move Bellerin forward and introduce Debuchy? Ship Santi on the left, move Alexis on the right and introduce Flamini?
Wenger said himself after the Sheffield game, “We don’t have a big enough squad for all the competitions”. Why is that? Could we have done something about this?
I will not buy excuses again. We have to survive this period and hope that Aaron, Theo and Alex will be back after the internationals (which they will hopefully skip).
Cheers.
Konstantin