Arsene Wenger was not specifically bemoaning the crippling Arsenal injury list that he has had to cope with for the last two seasons at least, but you could forgive the boss for cursing his luck. There have been many reasons why Arsenal have not been crowned champions of England since that historic invincibles campaign over 10 years ago, such as having to sell our best players while Chelsea and Man City were bankrolled by billionaires, but you could say that with better luck on the injury front we would not have had to wait so long.
Arsene Wenger certainly seems to think so as his comments from today’s post match interview, reported by the Arsenal website, show. The Frenchman was talking about the great recent form Arsenal have shown since getting a few key players like Ramsey, Ozil and Giroud back from the treatment room.
He said, “We missed important players at the start of the season where we dropped too many points. If you look since everybody’s been back and available, the number of points we have made shows we have the quality to fight at the top.
“When you start the championship with the players coming back from the World Cup not available and having big players out for three or four months, we played six games in the Premier League and won one. You have a mountain to climb after. We are a consistent side and consistency is linked with quality.”
It is hard to disagree that we suffered from all those injuries this season and would have been much closer to, or even above, Chelsea otherwise. And you could say the same for last season, with the losses of Ramsey, Ozil, Walcott, Podolski and the Ox coincided with our fall from the top spot.
You could even go back and say that Arsenal would probably have won the title in 2008 but for that nightmare leg break for Eduardo. We were five points clear going into that game but then went five without a win and finished four points behind Man United.
If you look at our record in 2015, with 10 wins and two losses from 12 games, earning 2.5 points per game, that would give 95 points from 38, the highest Premier League points total ever. So do you agree that our injury problems have denied Arsenal the title?