If it was a doubt before, Havertz will definitely play in midfield against Spurs after Ødegaard’s injury.
I wrote an article a few days ago about how close we were to an injury crisis after Calafiori reported back to London early from international duty, while new-signing Mikel Merino was already sidelined and Declan Rice was ridiculously red-carded. These fears have seemingly been proven right after our skipper Martin Odegaard had a nasty looking ankle injury against Austria.
Arsenal fans only spend international breaks worrying about episodes like this, especially when the games seem meaningless to us and we would rather play computer games or gambling on casinos like luckyblock.com to fill in our time until the proper football comes back to our TV screens.
This injury to Odegaard means that ahead of the visit to Spurs on Sunday we’ll be without our first-choice midfield, with arguably two of the most important players in the squad missing out, unless a miracle happens. After doing further tests at the club Odegaard will likely miss that game, and potentially the crucial games against Atalanta and Man City as well. With him most likely to miss the games the obvious replacement would be Kai Havertz.
Much debate has surrounded how Arsenal would line up in midfield prior to the Odegaard injury with calls for Havertz to replace Rice on the left 8. However after this injury it won’t be a debate anymore especially given that Jesus will hopefully be fit enough to face Tottenham.
Arteta will probably tweak the set up after these injuries, in which I think he’ll utilize the German as a central no.10 with a double pivot of Partey and Jorginho. Havertz is a completely different profile to Odegaard despite having being bought by Arteta to play in midfield in the first place.
We will definitely miss key qualities that our skipper brings to the starting eleven but we’ll just have to trust the German to put in a solid display in his stead, saying this though Havertz could well continue as the starting striker given other options that can play, in the squad the most similar profile is Nwaneri but it would be a big ask for him to put on a top performance in the North London derby if he started.
This is a quite unfortunate predicament we find ourselves with the injuries, but we’ll just have to adapt to the changes, the fact that we have the smallest squad in the Premier league is not helping our case at all in dealing with these injuries. I also think we didn’t do a good job with bringing in an understudy to our skipper given how we let one go in the summer( Viera) without bringing anyone else in.
Who do you think would be the perfect replacement for Odegaard in the Spurs game, Trossard, Havertz or Nwaneri?
