If Arsenal needed to bet it’s house on something, you’d probably bet the exact opposite of whatever they do, right?

“All on red for us”

“Erm….yeah, i’ll take black please…”

I am, of course, referring to the news that Sami Mokbel broke yesterday about Kai Havertz, who is rumoured to have suffered a hamstring injury whilst on the Dubai trip that the team returned back to England from yesterday. Sami is a respected journo, but I’m not linking to the publication he works for, as I think think it’s a horrible paper – so here’s Arseblog’s reporting on it for more info.

To extend out my metaphor further, if Arsenal were a person, you’d follow them around in the casino to make sure you were there on whatever game they were playing afterwards, because they aren’t winning any cashola on the slots, that’s for sure.

We are just over a week since the transfer window has shut – about nine days – and we’ve lost two players (rumoured) since then. We’ll get confirmation from Mikel when he does his press conference on Friday, but unless he can give us some Lazarus-esque news on both Martinelli and Havertz, then we’re down to one recognised first teamer, one loanee who has looked absolutely turgid so far for us, then a 17-year-old with bags of promise that we’re hanging most of our creative hopes on.

Who could have predicted such ill-fortune for us this season?

Oh, I don’t know, how about every single Arsenal fan on God’s green earth, perhaps? This season has been disruption after disruption, injury scare after injury scare, PGMOL blunder after PGMOL blunder and the second that January window slammed shut and we saw briefings about being “impressed that the club didn’t panic” I think most of us guessed that it would not be long before we ended up with a problem in our attacking end of the pitch. No Saka, no Jesus, no Martinelli and now potentially no Havertz means that the decision to ‘keep the powder dry’ was a sensible as throwing a can of petrol on a bonfire.

I’ve seen some commentary about how Havertz has played similar minutes to Salah and Haaland. But just over a week ago we were seeing the likes of Thierry Henry talk about how Haaland offers little in games. He is a man – like Salah – who is deadline in short bursts. I have not looked at the numbers, but I bet if you looked up distance covered on a football field this season, Havertz’s would be significantly greater than those other two elite forwards. Simply put – he has been ran into the ground and that is why we are where we are. We play players so regularly and we ask them to do so much (remember how many times we’ve all talked about how good we are off the ball, at how quick we are to get back into defensive shape and how difficult it is for teams at times because of our ability to cover so much ground?) as part of their roles, that inevitably they are going to break. You can’t compare apples and pears and talking about some player sin other teams versus Arsenal players just doesn’t work – they aren’t asked to do the same things as ours are.

I put a message on social media last night that this season can get in the bin. I was being flippant, I was being silly, but part of me is kind of just waiting for the inevitable final nail in the season coffin so that we can all start looking at next season and hoping the club addresses it’s failings from the last two windows. I know that sounds defeatist, I know it sounds a little spineless, but I just feel like everything that could have gone wrong this season has, so sometimes you just can’t beat the footballing gods.

I don’t even feel like I can be arsed to apportion blame at this stage either. What’s the point? Arteta isn’t to blame because he was very clear he needed reinforcements. The players aren’t to blame because they’ve run through brick walls (and picked up knocks on the way 😉 ). Edu left halfway through the season and whilst I am not wholly convinced whether or not Jason Ayto is the answer, I don’t know enough about him or what he does, or how hard he works to understand or really cast judgement and throw some shade on him. I will admit that I have never trusted KSE and that has remained the case even through these recent periods. But I don’t really feel like turning this into a bashing session on them either; I think they have been very fortunate to have a bunch of football people running the club who have got us in the position we are now that we’ve been challenging for the title – it is not because of them or their money though – the money Arsenal have spent is the money they make. KSE might have acted as signatories, but they haven’t been putting their hands deep into their pockets – any money that came from COVID or the intervening years was in the form of loans I believe. I didn’t heap praise on them when the going was good, I’m not going to go in two-footed because of the two windows we’ve just had.

Maybe there are just season’s like this though? Maybe we are using up all of our bad luck this season so we can be prepped for another assault on the league next season? I’m not a superstitious man in any walk of my life except football, but this Kai news, the Martinelli news, Saka, Jesus, Odegaard (I haven’t even mentioned that it sounds like Tomiyasu is out for the season and will need knee surgery), the red cards, etc, etc, etc – it all just feels a little too much, eh?

So we just have to roll with the punches. I’ll enjoy our wins, i’ll be sad about our defeats, but at this stage in this season, expectations need to be squarely managed I think. Time to focus on the journey a bit more folks, because the destination in May might be a little too much to ask for these fantastic group of footballers we support.

Catch you all tomorrow.