Another day, another rumour of an injury spell on the sidelines, this time for poor old Tommy Rosicky. If the rumours are to be believed, then he’ll need surgery on his knee and an anticipated spell in the treatment room will see him unable to take part in any games for the next two months.

Of course at this stage it’s just speculation until the club confirms it, but these types of rumours – as opposed to dastardly transfer ones – usually have a bit of foundation to them, unfortunately.

Quite where it leaves him is beyond me. The squad is a deep one at the moment and along with Flamini, Rosicky probably needs a bit of fortune the other way – i.e. injuries to current first team players – to stand a chance of breaking in to the first team. So to have him out of the side until potentially October or even November is a blow for him and probably for us as well. Each time in the last couple of seasons he’s had a spurt of games in which he’s looked really impressive. Normally it’s been after the halfway mark in a season, when the games come thick and fast and we (touch wood) are fighting on multiple cup fronts, so perhaps it won’t have that much of an impact. But if he was harbouring hopes of some kind of veterans recall to the side if things start to turn sour in terms of our form with the existing players who have the nod ahead of him at the moment, this injury will hardly have done him any favours.

When he returns to the team the players will be in full swing in the season and I suspect his time on the pitch – at least until after Christmas – will be limited to Capital One Cup displays only. Assuming that we aren’t knocked out in the earlier stages, that is.

Much like Jack though, it won’t really affect us at the moment, even if it is a sad state to see a player so well liked at the club seemingly running down the last year of his contract while crocked. Who knows, maybe Shad has some sort of miracle cure he can lavish upon the Czech’s brittle bones?

There’s really not a lot else going on at the moment though. There’s a piece about Ozil being a role model for young people looking to integrate in to different cultures. It’s funny actually, because a lot of negativity is labelled at professional footballers in the modern game; “they earn too much money”, “they have everything on a plate for them”, “they dive around too much”, etc, etc, but one of the attributes that most footballers seem to be very good at is integration in to new cultures. It’s no easy feat leaving your family and friends to play in a foreign country, make a life somewhere that you’d never have dreamed of as a kid and then potentially have to up-sticks and move a few years later, yet that is one part of a footballers life that they just seem to get on with. Ozil has been to Madrid and Arsenal, having grown up in Gelsenkirchen, where he no doubt still has family and friends. It makes life easier that global travel is so much more affordable and accessible I suppose, but every time I think about having to move to a completely foreign part of the world to start a new life, I don’t find it too appealing. Especially so if you have a very close family base.

So for all of the sniping when you hear about stories like Di Maria’s family not settling in Manchester, or Fabregas being desperate to come back to London to be with his girlfriend and child, perhaps you (and certainly I) might think twice about it being something that shouldn’t affect a footballer. If it happened to me I’m pretty sure it would affect my working life.

Perhaps I’m making excuses for them unnecessarily, but I just find it interesting to think about these footballers as normal people with normal families and friends, just like us in that instance. They’re not robots. They need a stable foundation with which to live their lives.

Anyway, we’ll surely find out later from Le Boss which one of our sacks of meat are available to play on Sunday and hopefully the jack Wilshere news is a little more positive. There are a few stories floating around that his injury is not as bad as first feared. I don’t suspect he’ll be back this weekend, but if he’s available next week or the week after for Newcastle away, then that would be fantastic.

Ooh, one more thing before I go, which is to praise good old (young) Chuba. Two in two for the loanee at Hull and if he really is harbouring designs on breaking in to the Arsenal team next season, a season with a bounty of goals is the right way to go about it. I really hope he does. It would be nice to see another product of the youth team be a success at Arsenal. Good lad Chuba!