Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta continues his preparations for Wednesday evenings Champions League tie with Monaco, and although he has praised our clinical nature from set pieces in recent games, and played down the open play element of our goal scoring (or lack thereof), we all know that something needs to change on that front and that there would be no better time for that to happen than in front of the Emirates faithful as we picked up another European three points.
We sit in third place in the Premier League table, but arguably we should be in second spot given more wasteful performances, and we are also looking comfortable for the automatic qualification spots in the new Champions League format as we have three wins and a draw from five, and could move from seventh spot into second with a win if other results go our way.
But sadly our preparations for the game against eighth placed Monaco have been seriously hampered by injuries, and as things stand we could be without six defenders. We were already without Ben White and Takehiro Tomiyasu with their respective knee injuries expected to keep them out until after the New Year, and Gabriel, Riccardo Calafiori and Oleksandr Zinchenko all missed Sunday’s 1-1 draw with Fulham in the Premier League and they continued to be sadly absent from Tuesday’s training session.
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Unfortunately from our point of view, Jurrien Timber and Thomas Partey were also noticeably absent from the training runout, and if the initial speculation is to be believed, they were not omitted for precautionary reasons, it is believed that they have already been ruled out of the game entirely.
Gaffer Arteta was expected to give a proper update when he met with the media later on in the day, but as it stands that would make seven defensive players out given Partey who can fill in at full back when necessary.
As fans will know we have been blighted with injuries all season long so far, and we were without five defenders for the Fulham game, but hopefully our injury list will begin to significantly ease in the coming weeks, as last weekend gave us a small boost on that front as we saw both left backs Kieran Trippier and Myles Lewis-Skelly return to training and the bench, but you would imagine Wednesday may come a little bit too quickly for either of them to return straight to the starting XI.
At least they are back in contention though, and hopefully, soon to be joined by the others.
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