As clear as night follows day, summer follows spring, and Phil Brown is a self promoting moron, Arsenal will get themselves in an almighty pickle with injuries long before the Christmas break.
The tradition has been continuing for many a long year, and with the news now of another injury to a reserve left back, Arsene Wenger is going to have to shuffle the pack again to get a team out at Sunderland capable of getting a result. That team might include Mickael Silvestre. Yikes.
I am never surprised that Arsenal get these injuries, but the fact still amazes me. What do they do to these players that make them as brittle as dry balsa wood? Having read between the lines (And also from a few years’ experience watching the excuses roll in) I can surmise that it’s a mixture of three main issues;
1. Wenger gets injury prone players in on the cheap. Rosicky would have cost £20 million if not built from biscuits. Van Persie was a snip at £2.75million, but has never played more than 28 league games in a season. And don’t even mention Amaury Bischoff in my company
2. The training regime tightens the muscles so tightly that any little tweak in a game gets the players in all sorts of bother. Arsenal use plyometric training, which seems to stress the muscles. This makes Arsenal one of the fittest, most technically able teams, but comes at a cost of a high injury return.
3. Sheer dumb bad luck. Arsenal have had 2 serious broken legs in the last 4 years (Eduardo and Diaby), Rosicky had a mystery detachment, Clichy has broken his back(!), and Nasri got his leg fractured by his own player!!. Even Thierry Henry couldn’t finish his final season with some bizarre injury. All clubs get injuries ,but Arsenal players seem to get them at the most inopportune moments, and to the most inopportune players. And how many players pick up injuries on international duty? Man alive!
And it’s not the volume of injuries that’s the problem, either. It’s the distribution. There are three strikers out injured at present. Earlier this season the first and second choice goalkeepers out injured. Now both left backs are out. It means that Arsenal, more than most other teams in the top half of the table, are fielding squad players in important games.
Squad depth may be an issue, but not many teams have three top players for each position.
The most frustrating thing is that, come the end of the season, there’s a very real danger that these injuries are used as an excuse for not winning anything, or to say ‘next year is our year’ like those liverpudlians always do. Not that this sort of thing doesn’t happen at other clubs, but as an Arsenal fan I feel it more keenly.
No more excuses. Arsenal need to sort out their injury situation somehow, if they are ever to win some silverware.
