Arsenal injury crisis? You have to laugh | OneFootball

I have kept seeing reference made to the ‘Arsenal injury crisis’ ahead of Tuesday night’s match.

Obviously, whoever Newcastle United are facing next, you then get stories relating to that club popping up on your social media and when looking online generally.

It got me wondering just what kind of a boost this is going to be at the Emirates, the first leg of this cup semi-final and so many star Arsenal players unavailable.

Newcastle United in such splendid six in a row form, up against an opponent missing so many players.

Then I started to try and work out who exactly Arsenal don’t have available for this Newcastle match.

I was struggling to think of many, certainly beyond Saka and White.

I looked it up on the excellent ‘Premier Injuries’ site and this is the ‘lengthy’ list of missing Arsenal players:

Raheem Sterling – Knee injury and expected back this coming weekend.

Bukayo Saka – His thigh injury expected to keep him out until the end of March.

Ben White – Expected back from his knee injury in February.

Ethan Nwaneri – A muscular injury and expected back at the start of February.

Takehiro Tomiyasu – Arteta hoping to have him back later this month, having been missing due to a knee issue.

That. Is. It.

A bit like the much reduced bags of crisps (bring back Tudor!) these days, I was tempted to tip the ‘Arsenal injury crisis’ upside down, to see where the rest of them were hiding.

As I said earlier, Saka and White are obviously first eleven players, but where are all these other key missing players?

Loan player Raheem Sterling has only played 146 minutes of Premier League football this season for Arsenal, recently injured but before that repeatedly named on the bench.

Tomiyasu is a squad player, the previous two seasons only making 16 starts out of 76 Premier League matches.

Whilst Nwaneri is only 17 years of age and has started just two Premier League matches in his entire, very short, career so far.

Havertz is expected back after illness tonight, available for the Newcastle United match.

Digging deeper, reading what Arsenal fans are saying, it isn’t an injury crisis the Gunners are having, it is crisis of confidence in so many of their players. A feeling that so many can’t be relied upon, summed up by the last couple of matches at the Emirates, a goalless draw against Everton and narrowest of 1-0 wins over Ipswich.

When drawing with Brighton at the weekend, Arsenal had the likes of Martinelli, Zinchenko, Odegaard, Neto, Kiwior and Tierney on the bench.

It is laughable for the lazy compliant Arsenal media to be going along with this thing of poor Mikel Arteta missing so many players.

Tonight, you are talking about first teamers Saka and White missing, plus three Arsenal squad players.

Whereas Newcastle United are missing three who would automatically be starting in Pope, Schar and Bruno, whilst Wilson, Lascelles and Krafth also remain long-term missing.

As Newcastle United fans, we talk about how things are actually relatively positive these days when it comes to available players!

Yet you get the likes of so many in the media, as well as opposing fans, still claiming how exaggerated the Newcastle United injury crisis was last season. Totally in denial that it was the worst ever season in our club’s entire history when it came to so many key players missing for so long.

This was the Newcastle United team that beat Man U 1-0 at the start of December 2023:

Pope, Trippier, Lascelles, Schar, Livramento, Bruno, Lewis Miley, Joelinton, Almiron, Gordon, Isak

The subs:

Dubravka, Karius, Dummett, Krafth, Hall, Diallo, Alex Murphy, Parkinson, Ritchie

Newcastle United literally had the same eleven available and starting week after week, including a 17 year old Miley playing in midfield, every weekend and midweek for around three or four months. Whilst our bench was repeatedly made up of goalkeepers (sometimes three of them!), kids and veterans who were well past their best.

Pope got injured at the end of that Man U match and missed almost the entire rest of the season, at that point in December 2023 he joined a missing list of Tonali, Botman, Burn, Targett, Longstaff, Wilson, Barnes, Willock and Jacob Murphy.

For so long, Eddie Howe was missing a whole team’s worth of players, or worse at times.