Welcome to the part of the week in which we Arsenal fans should be calling this season:

Praying time.

It’s that period in which we still have a solid three-and-a-bit days before we play, we won’t get Mikel Arteta’s press conference until tomorrow, so all we’re doing is scrolling through endless speculative injury-update ITKs saying things like:

I don’t know why a Man United fan account chap has an insight track into what goes on at London Colney, but because it is praying time I – like many other people I follow on social media channels – instantly latched on to it like a crumb of food to a starving man in the desert.

It’s just symptomatic of this season though, isn’t it, that the crumb of hope was also delivered with a side order of manky, slightly gone-off, despair, to sully what would otherwise be a welcome and tasty morsel. Riccardo Calafiori has a ‘crucial scan’ and given our luck this season, it wouldn’t surprise me if we heard from Arteta that he’s out for the season because of that knee injury. He fell awkwardly, it didn’t look like a nice one, plus he has this rather nasty looking injury history that I don’t want to be all ‘Negative Nelly‘ on you this Thursday morning, but it doesn’t read great and it is something I talked about when we were linked with him over the summer. And when we were linked with Zinchenko and Tomiyasu, I did the same look up on TransferMarkt and the issues seemed to feel very similar at the time, I have to say. And look how those two players’ Arsenal careers have turned out: blighted by injury and that we’ve all started to move on from them. I fear the same already for Calafiori. He’s been at the club around three months and he joined us not 100% fit, picked up an injury over the September international break, then now this. There’s no doubt that he’s a super looking player and when fit I’m sure valuable, but if he’s ruled out for any length of time when we know about this scan, then it’s all going to feel a little Tomiyasu-y to me.

But let’s get hooked back up to the hopeium, eh? And that has to come in the hope that Saka might be fit and might have trained to make him somewhat ready for the game at the weekend. He’s been out since 12th October and so we’re already talking two weeks as of Saturday that he hasn’t played. There’s not really been any update on what, exactly what it is, other than a few places reporting that it’s a thigh injury. I’m assuming it was a hamstring, which is tough because that’s obviously where a lot of the running power of a player comes in, so you have to be careful about exacerbating it too much and you can understand why Arsenal have been reluctant to do anything. I suspect they’ve been getting him to do light jogging and things like that, so Saka ‘returning to training’ could be just gym work, like what Martin has been doing for a couple of weeks now. The good news is that Saka has recently played, so you’d hope that from a match fitness perspective, that wouldn’t be as much of an issue.

There’s absolutely no chance Arteta tells us anything tomorrow though. If there’s an opportunity for him to not give Liverpool any options on studying our game plan, then he’ll do it, so we won’t really know until the team sheet comes out. Arteta has done it before where injured players have turned up in their tracksuits even though they haven’t been in the squad before, just to try to ‘give the eyes’ to the opposition and their approach, so I don’t really think we’ll even know if Saka is available until the whole squad is announced. It means that we’ll have to be reliant on these ITKs and for me right now when it’s report by just one individual (I haven’t seen anyone else more reliable saying anything just yet) then you always have to take it with a pinch of salt. But because I’m in a hopeful mood this morning (despite the Calafiori para), I’m going to fall on the side of it being delicious Maldon Sea Salt crystals, rather than the budget supermarket own brand low sodium crap.

Please Bukayo. Just be fit and able to play and play well) on Sunday. We need you.

And we really do, because Liverpool won again last night, that’s their 11th in 12 matches this season, Arne Slot is having a lovely ol’ time as Liverpool boss and it must feel like they can do no wrong. They’ve had a favourable fixture list, for sure, but they’ve still – by and large – got the job done and you cannot put a price on momentum and confidence and what that can do for a team. The way those Liverpool players will be feeling will be top of the world right now and when you think about how many key players we currently have out injured compared to them (Alisson aside, maybe Jota although he might be back for Sunday, but the rest I would class as rotational players), it feels like the wind is in their sails a little more than ours.

I’m already starting to get the nervous ‘feels’ for Sunday – that’s all I’m saying. Defeat at home to a side who is looking very much like a title challenger would be a hammer blow to us this season and in a season in which it has felt like we are lurching from one unfortunate situation to the next, this feels like it could very quickly slip away from us if we aren’t careful.

We’re not there yet though. So let’s stay on the hopeful side of the situation right now.

It’s praying time.