Ahead of Tuesday evening’s absolutely critical UEFA Champions League fixture with Dinamo Zagreb, Arsène Wenger spoke with the assembled media about a variety of topics. Among them: injury updates on a few players. There were very few surprises from the boss, but the squad will at least be getting one crucial player back.
Coquelin and Arteta are out. Arteta is short-term and Coquelin is longer. How big the damage is we don’t know but we will know for certain this [Monday] afternoon. Everyone from Saturday’s game is available and Ramsey is available.
Getting Aaron Ramsey back from his injury is a big life to a squad who could use his energy and creativity, and the loss of Francis Coquelin may facilitate Wenger into playing the Welshman in a central position, where he has previously insisted he prefers playing.
However, losing Francis Coquelin, who has been somewhere between solid and spectacular this season, is a huge blow to the club, who seem to have few ready replacement options for the Frenchman. Wenger may be forced to get creative with the position for some time, as he revealed what many Arsenal fans feared, that the injury may be long-term.
It is at least a month. I’m a bit cautious as we have had so many bad surprises on the scans… but the team for the next few months will be without Coquelin.
Wenger also addressed the notion that Arsenal have proved themselves to be a particularly injury-prone club over the past several years.
It looks like that at the moment. I must say we have been hit very hard in November as until November and the Sheffield Wednesday game we had quite a good record and since then we lost a few players. But now we have Ramsey and for the weekend Oxlade-Chamberlain will be back as well. After that Walcott will be the next one. [As for] the players who have long-term injuries, basically some of them are from last season like Rosicky and Welbeck.
Arsenal have lost nearly 245 man-games per season over the past five campaigns, second only to Newcastle United in average injuries per year. However, according to injury analyst Ben Dinnery, the Gunners’ injury record this season has been near-average for Premier League clubs and experienced a significant drop over the second half of last season, an indication that the trend may be reversing itself.
