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As Mikel Arteta returned from Dubai, after a trip that was supposed to rejuvenate his squad, the Arsenal manager was poring over various ideas to navigate a proper injury crisis. Arteta’s staff are big on the maths of the pitch, and often run tactics through algorithms. Right now, only a few simple sums matter.
Arsenal did not sign a forward in January. That left an already shallow range of attacking options at risk from injury. Now, the worst has happened. Kai Havertz’s hamstring injury, which is expected to sideline the German for the rest of the season, means three first-choice attackers are out.
They only have three forwards available for the next few games, and one is the budding 17-year-old Ethan Nwaneri, who has little experience. Moments like these are where you get that experience, but, although there are vintage examples of youngsters seizing this sort of opportunity in the past, it’s an unreasonable amount of responsibility.
From that history, it has occasionally been said that title races ultimately turn on individual moments, those that carry the weight of a season’s accumulation of events.
Such statements are usually intended to mean decisive goals on the pitch. As regards Arsenal’s challenge to Liverpool, however, this might be it. That the Havertz news leaked on the day of the leaders’ crucial derby trip to Everton only added depth to it. Given these attacking options, Arsenal may need to be more concerned with those underneath them and the Champions League places.
It also poses a huge depth of questions for Arteta and his club. The manager himself spoke of the need to keep everyone fit before the Carabao Cup match at Newcastle United. This will now feel worse than that elimination.
In the short term, the maths ensure it is almost impossible to see Arsenal keeping pace with Liverpool, let alone overhauling them.
They might get by with one or two games but the real problem with situations like this is asking players to do more than can be fairly expected over an extended run. That’s when drop-offs become apparent. And this is at a point where Arsenal really needed to be operating at their maximum, without making a single mistake, while hoping Liverpool faltered.
In the medium term, there’s also the question of the Champions League challenge, which had been viewed as a potential season-saver. Arsenal had seemed well set up, right down to players coming back fresh, until now.
Then there are the long-term discussions to be had about how recruitment combines with preparation.
Arteta now has to face up to one highly uncomfortable fact. It is not just that his entire front three are out, given the absences of Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli as well as Havertz. It’s that they’re all out with different types of hamstring injuries. In football, these and quad injuries are usually taken as signs of players being overworked.
That is perhaps a natural consequence when your attack is already so thin. The problem will nevertheless invite inevitable questions over the intensity of Arteta’s training, of the same kind faced by Ange Postecoglou, Erik ten Hag and countless other managers who have faced injury crises.
The sheer number of them shows the new calendar obviously hasn’t helped, and clubs had already flagged this as the most intensive January ever. That’s on top of four years of congestion. It should be acknowledged Arsenal didn’t have these problems last season, and Martin Odegaard’s ankle injury wasn’t from fatigue. It was from a challenge, and bad luck.
Some of it still comes down to how you manage it all, mind. A player like Havertz, no matter his physical capabilities, has just played too much over too short a period. There’s now an obvious feeling, in the words of one source, that some of this was “avoidable”. Was there really such a need for the main attackers to play so many minutes over such a period? And what of the decision to sell Eddie Nketiah, who would be so useful now?
It’s why Arsenal could have done with even a loan deal in January. Arteta was against bringing in “a body” but they now need that more than anything. It’s all the worse that it seems so obvious now.
For all the emotional angst this is going to cause around the club, there was still some logic to those decisions. They attempted to look at the bigger picture, and five-year plans rather than just this one difficult season.
It was a calculation, even if it now looks like a gamble that has backfired, that itself was based on the hope of no further problems. That now seems even worse, as Arteta makes other calculations.
How Arsenal set up against Leicester City on Saturday is going to be instructive. Rather than just playing the same 4-3-3, it is possible that Arteta will lean more on his disproportionate number of midfielders and go to a 4-5-1 with more attacking focus on Odegaard. That at least would ease some of the burden on Leandro Trossard, Nwaneri and Raheem Sterling, too. Sterling will be ineligible to face Chelsea on 16 March under the terms of his loan deal, though Saka may have returned by that point. Trossard and Mikel Merino look poised for spells in the side as forwards too.
Some might say it is just as well they “only” face a relegation-threatened Leicester. That can work the other way if a straining attack fails to score.
By the same token, Arteta will fully lean into his usual response to these situations, which is to be as positive as possible. He is aware that constant talk of injuries can negatively affect a squad, so will instead point forward. That can often seem delusional, but that’s part of the point: to shut out doubt.
Similarly, it is some small consolation for Arteta that February is a much less intense month, during which Arsenal have no European matches and another FA Cup break at the end. If they can just get through the games against Leicester away, West Ham at home and Nottingham Forest away, they can then take stock.
There may be hope that Saka and Martinelli will be back from their injuries by then, but that will invite another calculation, and potential dilemma. You don’t want to rush players back from injuries like this. That can just compound the problems.
Getting through and taking stock in that way has also felt like the story of a season that started with such hope. For now, the title isn’t quite settled. The prospect of a race, to use the language around these situations, is nevertheless down to the bare bones.
