BUKAYO NEWS PUTS CHOKESLAM ON SEASON

ENGLAND STARBOY OUT FOR 2 MONTHS

The Bukayo news is in and it’s not good. 2 months at minimum. Which usually looks more like 2.5 months. We’re basically going to be without him until mid-March if he has an immaculate recovery.

Arteta spoke about one of the underlying factors.

I think so, yes. Obviously we started the season with one of the thinnest squads in the Premier League. We knew that. Okay, what do we need then? If we are the thinnest, what do we need? I really dig into that. I make sure that we utilise every player in the best possible potential. Everyone has to feel part of it. You need to rediscover players in different positions, relationships. It’s a great one. It’s a really good exercise and the boys are willing to do anything we demand them to do. That’s a really good thing as well.

I wrote about this issue at the start of the season, because the club knew they were playing with a fire going with a skinny squad. The first thing you have to unequivocally understand is that the decision to go into the season undergunned is never just the view of a single person. Arsenal operates a brain trust model like most proper sports organizations. There were a lot of factors involved in our less-than-stellar-summer activity. If you asked Arteta what his dream moves were - he’d be talking like you and me. He wants it all yesterday, but understands we’re not going to play games with transfer bans and we’re certainly not going to do things off the books.

Factors that played a role:

• Not getting Sesko for £45m. Young striker, great profile, very good price.

• Not shifting on enough players to satisfy ownership to move on bigger names. Gabi Jesus, Zinchenko, players that went on loan they’d hoped to sell, Kiwior

• Arsenal also try and play it safe with PSR, like a lot of clubs last summer. Most of our sales didn’t come until late in the window either, which dents your ability to move fast on the things you want.

Arteta will be the figurehead for all criticism (he’s paid to be that guy), but he works within the confines of what he has, and there simply wasn’t the ability to do all our business in a single window without moving players.

That said, the second part I bolded out.

If we are the thinnest, what do we need?

Injuries in football are partly about luck. Jurrien Timber blowing his knee out in game day one last season is a freak of an accident and there’s not much you can do to prevent that sort of thing. Martin Odegaard deciding to go on international duty with his heavily pregnant wife to see family before they had their kid was also not really within our control. Bukayo Saka, with a hamstring injury, in December, before it happens to a 32-year-old Mo Salah playing all the minutes. To me, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve been asking for this moment for a long time.

Bukayo has played 1800 minutes this season. He’s missed just one Champions League game. He’s played 3 England games. He has been in the matchday squad for 3 league cup outings, including a 72 minute showing against Bolton.

If you have the thinnest squad, you should look after key players a little bit better in my opinion. Arteta has a belief that elite players shouldn’t break. He’s said it in the past. The best players drop 4000 minutes a season. This is partly true, but the mindset is like saying ‘the best racing car drivers rarely crash, so why bother with a helmet?’

Arteta had safety apparatus in the squad. Ethan Nwaneri can play on the right. So can Martinelli, Jesus, and Sterling. Gabi J and Sterling combined minutes are 66% of Saka’s.

I also want to know what Arteta is doing in training. We know he loves intense sessions. He believes players should spend a lot of time together. But the output of that is you put more load on players who are match fit, playing 3 games a week, and there are consequences. This is what he said before the United game.

We had an issue with Gabi, we have an issue with Ricky as well, yesterday we lost Thomas and Mikel and Myles which was very bad news.

We’re in December. If you’re beasting players in training, it’s only for the benefit of the manager. They don’t need any more fitness. They are top-level in tactics. It’s just adding more risk into the system… and here we are, in December, with yet more key players out in the long term.

The deeply frustrating part of it all is we’ve been losing players in clusters. We lost all our left backs at the same, we lost our centre back options the other week, now we’ve lost our right wingers at the same time.

Arteta is trying to talk with positive language.

I am putting some ideas together. I haven’t got there yet, but I have a few. Then I want to speak with them as well, to understand how we are going to generate that and take it in a positive way. Because we are going to be different. We went through the period [without] Martin, we went through the period with five, six defenders missing, we went through the period without many other players. We will continue to do that: finding ways and taking it with positive energy. That’s it.

Really hard to spin this news as a positive. He’s our main man. The player who has the magic. Now we have to manage over two months without him. This puts a lot of doubt into the system. We’re trying to catch a truly blessed team when it comes to luck and it feels like every week there’s something else that pops up that makes you feel like it’s just not going to be our year.

Objectively, everything is going for Liverpool. Yes, it’s hilarious they destroyed Spurs 6-3 in London. Yes, it’s really amusing to watch Ange give press conferences like he’s just been caught stealing top shelf mags from a newsagent and he’s been asked to apologise. Yes, I absolutely love reading Spurs fans complaining about standards after begging City to beat them without realising that would impact their summer spend and leave them short in games like that one yesterday.

… but fuck me, how many times this season are teams going to play Liverpool severely depleted? Spurs had a baby midfielder as a centre back. Even with that shi*ty line-up, they still managed to score three goals. A fully fit Spurs is not letting that happen to them. A fully fit *any* decent team is going to cause that Liverpool side problems. They aren’t the best team in the country, but they are the most blessed side.

It makes me sick. The second time City dip in the last 8 years and it’s Liverpool catching all the luck. Still a long way to go, but Chelsea aren’t going to challenge for the title, and Arsenal are going to have to find a miracle to replace the immensity Bukayo brings to the starting 11.

There’s no one we could pick up in January that would give us that sort of boost. Maybe Marcus Rashford at his absolute peak. But this is a guy who hasn’t been coached properly for 8 years. He can’t press. He doesn’t like to run. He’s just been dumped by his girlfriend because she’s going on national TV on a show called Love Island which cannot be good for a man suffering heartbreak.

Listen, I’m depressing myself right now. I’m going to go away, buy some Christmas food, rally, then come back with more toxic positivity than you can handle. But… in the meantime, I have a project for you. Can you pinpoint some stories in the past where Arsenal or another club has signed a player in Janauary that has kicked them on to new levels? Even better, can you think of one who has picked up the slack of a broken player?

Drop it in the comments.

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