When Norway boss Solbakken called up Odegaard, I naturally feared the worst, as I’m sure you did too. Footballers are a little different from you and I, you see, because where I personally would happily tell England to ‘do one’, they want to play for their national teams in these pointless glorified friendlies. So I fully expected Martin Odegaard to travel to Norway, play two 90 minute football matches and then probably have – if not a setback – then a level of fatigue that meant he wouldn’t be the man in tip top shape that we need him to be for the next six week’s as we hurtle towards the festive period.

It didn’t matter that he’d been injured for around two months. It didn’t matter that his body probably needs another week or two of training before he’s ready to play two games over an extended weekend spell for his international team. Norway and their coaching staff would run him in to the ground, chew him up, then spit him back out to us with a muscular injury that would keep him out for a few weeks.

That’s what I’d projected in my head because that’s what we’ve seen from international managers over the years.

So imagine my surprise when I find out that, in fact, a sensible decision had been made by player and club to send him back to Arsenal to recover properly.

There might be some Norwegians out there who feel a little perturbed by this and, on face value, I could understand why. He played the whole game against Chelsea at the weekend, so why can’t he play for Norway this coming weekend? That all makes sense if you hadn’t watched the Chelsea game. If you had, you’d have seen like I did that he clearly tired towards the end and you could tell that his tank was empty. In fact, were it not the game that it was – a tough encounter against a Chelsea team who had been playing well and were at home with few, if any, injuries – I suspect that Arteta might have taken him off sooner than he did at the weekend. I suspect Arteta had thought that he probably had between 60 and 70 minutes in the tank, but because of the game state, he stayed on.

So the reality is that he wouldn’t have been ready for two games in – what is it? five days? – for Norway. Had he stayed with them and then got on for 20 minutes in one of the games, then I’d understand that and I suspect that conversation might already have been had, but Odegaard doesn’t really feel like an ‘impact sub’ to me. Solbakken and Norway want fully fit players to use. They don’t need to build players’ fitness up, they need fully fit and ready to go players, so when I think about it like that it makes sense that he’s now travelling back to London.

And this is good news for us Gooners. Our captain gets a week-and-a-half on the training ground. He hasn’t played any football for two months and he’s only just started full training, so he’s not going to want to go away somewhere warm like Benny Blanco might want to do. He’ll be on that training ground working every day to be ready for Forest at home.

And that is perfect.

We saw how much we missed his incision with that Martinelli goal. We all know that our problems are not solved with his absence; he has played in plenty of games where we were sh*te over the last couple of seasons. But what his arrival back in to the team does do is give us different options in attack. He allows us to mix it up a bit. We can do the physical thing, we can press a little higher, we can tuck in if needed, he will enable Ben White to overlap on Saka to create overloads, he will pick the ball up in the left half space and find Martinelli in more space on that left hand side. Odegaard’s arrival gives us not just another club in the golf bag, but a different way of playing with that club. We can punch through, we can flop, we can chop (sorry, going down a rabbit hole on the golf metaphors here); which means we are a little more unpredictable.

And that’s something we haven’t had of late. Teams worked out our alternate way of playing and the result was that our form has hit a bit of choppy waters. But now he’s back in London, getting himself fit, hopefully we’ll start to go on a run.

It won’t just be him we need though. This is a team sport and the news that Rice and Saka pulled out of the England squad is worrying, especially when coupled with Arteta’s comments about the two players after the game last Sunday. My hope is that they are now currently in a cryogenic chamber being preserved and rested for the weekend after this; the positive is that it is a solid 10 days in which we need them to rest up and hopefully they can return for that Forest game.

Others will need to step up too, so we aren’t completely out of the international woods just yet, because Saliba, Gabriel, Merino, Raya, Havertz and Martinelli will all run the gauntlet of international matches. So we just have to pray nothing happens to any of those on international duty. As Arteta said in the wake of the Chelsea game, it’s been eight weeks of consistent players going down with niggles, so we need to just get through this final international window and then get some flipping players back!

Famous last words, eh?

Anyhoo, I think i’ll leave it there for today. Catch you all tomorrow.