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How do Arsenal’s injuries stack up against their rivals?

Suburban Gooners Logo Suburban Gooners Logo With the Interdull now well underway and Arsenal fans having to spend their time looking at farcical programmes like Sky Sports’ Ref Watch, one could be forgiven for switching away completely from all things football for a while. Arteta spoke after the Sunderland match about ‘resetting‘ and I guess a lot of that is with the expected players to return to bolster the squad. It’s funny because the media keep going on and on about our squad depth – which we do have plenty of – but that has almost meant that in some quarters they completely avoid the fact that the team has spent practically all of this season with ultiple injuries to contend with.

If you’re a regular reader of my waffle, you’ll know that I occasionally come on here and do a bit of an update on injuries and the number of games missed per squad. It’s a fairly rudimentary calculation, but I basically get on to TransferMarkt, I have a look at the ‘absences’ section, which gives me an overview of the whole squad and every time a player has missed a game. It includes under-21 players and so I only pick those that most would class as ‘first teamers’. I then have a look at our rivals to see who has been more badly impacted. I figured with just over a quarter of the season gone, with Mikel referencing the injured players and with the fact that we are rumoured to be having a swathe of them returning for the North London Derby (**crosses everything**), I’d have a look at how badly hit each of the ‘Big’ teams have been hit. And Tottenham.

So, what do we have for absences? I’ll go in order of highest league position down. Because, you know, that’s fun to do at the moment for us.

Arsenal = 48

Man City = 53*

Chelsea = 52**

The Scum = 69

Liverpool = 39

So we’re not doing too badly, similar to those around us, but I guess for us the problem we’ve had is that they aren’t spread around the team. They’ve all been concentrated in attack and although it makes me immediately think that we’ve got some kind of curse, the reality is that a flurry of injuries in one position means that you become over-reliant on players to play all the time and stay fit. I think we all saw that with Gyokeres the weekend before last, who having played practically all the matches this season so far, broke down and could only manage 45 minutes against Burnley.

If those injuries were across positions then I suspect the depth that we have would be more manageable, but the concentration of it has led to us fielding a central midfielder as an auxiliary striker at the weekend. The Scum have had way more absences than anyone else, but theirs has been spread out, with it coming across four defenders, five midfielders and four attackers (I’ve included Manor Soloman for them because he was injured at the start of the season whilst registered for them before joining Villareal, so that one can be argued I guess). If you think – as Arteta said – that we’ve had seven attacking players out at one time (although Odegaard can be argued as a midfielder for the purposes of TransferMarkt) it kind of hits home on that concentration.

What this means for after the international break is that Arteta is going to need to manage the balance and the load of those players from now on. To be fair to him I think he started to show signs of that at the beginning of the season. Eze was on for 79 against Forest, then played 71 against Athletic Club Bilbao, before returning to the bench against City. I think we will see more of that from those attacking players as the options become wider and deeper for Arteta and whilst that won’t completely eradicate the possibility of injury completely, it will hopefully mitigate fatigue and muscular injury caused as a result.

We have a bit of a wait now until we find out just who is back fit. We won’t find out for another week I suspect, although the reporting that was coming out yesterday was that Madueke was a possibility for Sunderland, the club just didn’t want to risk him, so you’d hope he’s back for the visit of The Scum to our gaff. I would imagine that Gyokeres and Martinelli might be the next ones in line to make a return, then probably Odegaard, followed by Kai who has essentially not played this season. He’ll be eased in, but just seeing him on the bench will give us a massive boost, so I hope that we get that weekend after next.

Other than that there’s not really a lot going on right now as you’d expect, with players arriving to play for their international teams and train for a few days, so I will pause today’s musings and take my leave for another 24 hours. Have yourselves a great day and enjoy whatever Tuesday throws up for you.

*City include Kalvin Phillips, who is basically never going to play, although we have Gabriel Jesus in there who might be argued the same at this rate.

**Chelsea have about a billion players. So by sheer volume of numbers they’ll have more injuries

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Gooner born in 1982 from Harlow, Essex, now living in Uxbridge. I say what I see - frequently wrong, but hey, it's just an opinion piece, right? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.