What else could go wrong for Arsenal? by DN
We may have had an awful day today, but the worst is yet to come when we find out the result of the scan on Francis Coquelin’s knee tomorrow or Monday. He, for sure, will not be playing on Tuesday and probably nor will his backup Arteta after he got a calf strain.
Wenger says that Le Coq will have a scan tomorrow. The quicker the better I say. “We have two more injuries.” Le Prof said. “One is a muscle problem for Arteta and the other one is a knee problem and I don’t know how serious that is but we will know certainly tomorrow, for Coquelin. Arteta is a calf.”
I will be checking every half hour to find out the bad news, although as you can see I am sure it will be bad news. After our awful day today I would not be surprised in the slightest! Bad may be a bit mild, and Arsene Wenger even used the word nightmare….
“It was a bad afternoon” he said. “We missed a penalty, we gave a goal away on set-piece, that is perfect to make your afternoon a nightmare and we missed open goal chances. I believe that West Brom they were strong in the fight and they had one 100 per cent commitment as well and you have to give them credit for that.
“But overall I felt it dropped a huge blow when we scored and we just had to make sure they didn’t come back with a easy goal, and that is where we were disappointed today. But I cannot be mad at the team because they gave what they could until the last minute but we lost a bit of focus at 1-0 – at 35 minutes we were 1-0 up and then at 45 we were 2-1 down. Our defending on that level was very, very poor.”
So it was just a bad ten minutes then. But the last ten minutes of the second half weren’t so good either as Santi Cazorla slipped up while taking the penalty that would have saved us a point at least. “I have seen a few,” Wenger continued. “But I don’t really know what happened. You can talk to him and he is so disappointed and it is difficult to blame Cazorla for that. We have to take it on the chin and bounce back in our next game.
“It is a big blow today for us as if the game reflects the result then okay but when you drop points when you have come out of a game and think you have not done the maximum to produce you cannot be happy.”
We certainly are not happy, and not just because we lost out on the three points. We have also lost arguably our most important defensive player for god knows how long. And his backup! All we can hope is that Coquelin recovers a lot faster than most of our other injured players or we will certainly be losing more games in the future….
Darren