Before Arsenal’s game against Sunderland, Arsene Wenger parried questions about the rumoured long lay off for our little Spaniard Santi Cazorla, Mikel Arteta and Alexis Sanchez by simply saying “I don’t know.” despite rumours saying that Cazorla could be out for even longer than his midfield team-mate Francis Coquelin.
But after the game, Wenger was asked if Santi’s knee ligament had been ruptured and would require surgery. Suddenly Le Prof realised that he did know about Cazorla’s situation, and the Spaniard had already had the operation! “We know now.” he said. “It has happened already. It’s not the season. It is at least three months, maybe four.”
“Santi wanted to have a chance to come back quickly so he didn’t want to last too long for 25 opinions and he decided to go straight away,”
“The guy said, ‘look it’s a clear case, it’s a rupture of the external knee ligament’. And he said ‘Okay, let’s do it straight away.'”
Well that is cleared up, but there is one thing that worries me. Cazorla’s injury was sustained just after half time in the game against Norwich, and Alexis Sanchez got his hamstring problem problem 20 minutes later. The Chilean was taken off immediately but Cazorla was made to play right until the final whistle “on one leg”.
My question is why did the media go to great lengths to get Wenger to explain why Sanchez was playing in the first place, but no-one has asked the Boss why on Earth he kept an injured Cazorla on the pitch for the whole match? Surely he has to realise that that a major error that could have lost us the game, and it certainly wouldn’t have done Cazorla’s ligaments much good……