Yesterday I was writing about the rotten luck we’ve had this season in the wake of the Kai Havertz rumours. It felt like we couldn’t get any more bad luck this season, the level we’ve had from pretty much August onward, but then I forgot the propensity of the footballing gods to keep on battering you. Because yesterday in the afternoon I read that Havertz had suffered more than just a knock; he’d torn his hamstring and would be out for the rest of the season. It was an Ornbomb too, so you know it’s well sourced and whilst we can’t know for sure until the club / Arteta confirm it, it sounds pretty bad.

And it’s almost as if the footballing gods have looked at our January window and said “really? You REALLY want to tempt fate and test us? Ok then Arsenal, have some of this”. It was entirely predictable that we would find ourselves in this position, but I think some of the reporting sheds a light on how it was predictable and perhaps, just perhaps, it was also avoidable. Because if the noises are true and if Havertz was injured doing high-intensity pressing drills, then I am afraid we now need to look at the manager and his coaching staff, who have been beasting players whilst on a warm weather training and break.

We only know what is being reported, we can only speculate as we don’t have all the details, but in the absence of anything else I think as Arsenal fans we now need to be looking squarely in Arteta and his teams’ direction. These players have given everything. They have been run in to the ground because of a conscious decision to leave us light in the summer. We all knew we were light; the club, the manager, us fans and even the players. The fact we signed Sterling on a pretty dead loan on deadline day shows that the club knew it. The fact that we had the likes of Rice saying “we need some help” in January shows the players knew it. The fact that Arteta talked all January about bringing somebody in shows he knew it. Yet we failed to augment the squad and that put undue pressure on an attacking collective of players who were already running on empty.

So to then hear that the team running on empty, who were getting a Dubai trip for a rest and recharge, were potentially being beasted, brings out some frustration in me personally. Again, I will caveat this by saying that I can only take on board what I can read and see, so if the rumoured injury is not as it is reported and if it is not because of the overload being put on already overloaded players, then fair enough and I’ll temper that frustration. But at this stage and with what we know, we have to look at the way the club are approaching the rest and recuperation of the players and start asking legitimate questions as to why they are being asked to undertake some of these activities.

So where are we at now? We’ve got fans on socials talking about playing Merino at false nine, which certainly is creative to me, although I suspect what Arteta will be doing is going with a front three of Trossard up top, Nwaneri wide right and Sterling wide left. It’s hardly ideal, it’s a lot to ask for those three players and given it doesn’t sound like anyone else will return until mid March it means there’s three football matches we’re going to have to hope for some kind of resurrection of form for Sterling, continuation of form from Trossard and Nwaneri stepping up to the plate as a main man at 17. But we have no other choice. We made our decisions last summer, in January, in the way in which we train our players and in our approach, so we have to live in the life for which we have built ourselves. I asked the day after the January window closed: “I hope you know what you are doing, Arsenal” – that has never felt more pertinent than now.

And you hear stories like this latest Havertz development and start to think whether Dubai will have done anything at all. I spoke about this earlier in the week when I mentioned that I didn’t think Dubai would be the panacea that many of us were hoping for. Now it’s feeling like quite the opposite. And on an evening in which – and this is where the ‘giveth’ part of my title today comes in – Liverpool dropped points to an absolute sucker punch last minute equaliser for Everton. We should be buzzing this morning, because the anticipated Liverpool win and extension of their lead to nine points leaves us all but done in the title race never materialised. It was seconds from being that, but the footballing gods gave something back: Hopium. They handed a small morsel of it to us Arsenal fans on a day in which we were all pretty down as a result of the Havertz news. There’s still probably too much of a mountain to climb, especially now we are so shorn of attackers, but for now at least, the cold water hasn’t quite been poured all over our domestic season.

Be back tomorrow with some more musings.