LIMITS OF A DEAD SQUAD

ARSENAL GRAB GOOD DRAW, BUT IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO PREVENT THE PREMIER LEAGUE GOING TO LIVERPOOL

Arsenal’s title race truly finished last night when they dropped two points away at Nottingham Forest. The good news is we didn’t get walloped. The bad news is we are out of three competitions, and it’s only February. Very Wenger 2008-16. Our only remaining hope this season is that we somehow manage to find goals against PSV in the Champions League.

I’m not here to machine-gun fan TV spittle at your screen this morning—the performance was pretty good, all things considered. The team defended really well, limited Forest to ‘sit deep, hit them on the counter’ tactics, and managed to find ourselves in some favorable positions.

But… once again, we were found severely lacking without four of our forwards, who have been lost to the injury gods.

I hope those who have been telling me all season that my narrative about how Arteta manages player loads is wrong saw the John Cross article, where he dropped a story mostly about the cost of the Doobs trip—which I don’t really give a f*ck about—but buried in the story was what I thought would be an Athletic exclusive at the end of the season:

"It was a mix of rest and recuperation, but they also trained hard—they are believed to have only had one complete day off—and it was in one of the sessions when Havertz injured his hamstring."

Arsenal didn’t take player families out this time, and as they say in the biz, ‘idle thumbs in elite sport will work players into the ground to alleviate the boredom of having nothing to do.’ We’ve all been there; you buy 16 books at the airport, promise yourself you’ll read Proust, followed by Edward Gibbon’s book on Rome, then 26 minutes in, you’re on your phone, ripping through Outlook 6 Paloma’s deep, telling Derek in accounts to ‘keep my department’s name out your f*cking email.’ That’s Arteta.

He didn’t need to have Kai Havertz on a training pitch. The German could have stayed at home, properly recuperated, and been flying right now. The Dubai trip should not have been a training camp. We had no new players. We were in pretty decent form. The only issue we’ve had all season is severe fatigue. Instead of loosening managerial control at a crucial part of the season and trusting elite athletes not to just eat ice cream and play 17 hours of Fortnite a day, Arteta ran his players into the ground, lost his only striker, then came back to London with a dead team. And it seems he’s continued to work them into the ground because we’ve seen leggy performances in three of the last three games.