It wasn’t until Arteta’s post-match comments after the Fulham win that I realised that this Saturday lunchtime we could be travelling to Fulham with an entire defensive back line missing depending on what he says in his presser today.

Calafiori, Gabriel, White and Tomiyasu all out. Timber came off and if he’s missing you can replace Tomi with him for that ‘injured XI’. Now, of course I am stretching the truth a little bit, because we basically haven’t seen Takehiro all season, but it brings to light what has been a repeated issue for Arsenal this season.

I actually can’t remember a time it has been this bad, to be honest with you, because even if I look back over the last…say…20 years, it doesn’t feel like we’ve had as many problems as we do now. We’ve had injury crises before, sure, in one particular season I seem to recall us having two first-choice left backs and yet Pascal Cygan had to play there. But I don’t remember it being as consistent as this season from start to finish. If you think about it, every single game since the start of the season we’ve had key players missing. Right at the start of the season Gabriel Jesus was out. We signed Merino and he immediately broke his arm in training. Tomiyasu started the season injured, came on as a sub in one game, got injured again and will not be seen again.

In September we lost Odegaard (and Zinchenko). In October we still missed Odegaard, but we also lost Calafiori. In November it was White. In December it was Saka. In January Havertz was sick, so was Odegaard. February saw Martinelli and then Havertz go down with injuries. April will no doubt have Gabriel out of it. And these aren’t just one or two games, either, each of those were weeks/months at a time. In between the start of the season and now we’ve also had things like Nwaneri go down with injuries, MLS, little niggles to Trossard, etc. It’s been a horror of a season for Arteta in terms of player fitness. And the worst thing of all is that you can’t exactly legislate for it. You literally can’t have a team of more than 25 players, with youth players making up additional injuries, so stockpiling players on the event of the problems we’ve had this season just isn’t feasible.

Perhaps it was inevitable. We had a pretty decent run last season and the season before that too. I remember a few radio shows talking about how we hadn’t had any injuries and that was a reason for our fortune. Of course that’s not true because no team does what Forest appear to be doing this season (although admittedly they have no European football, went out of the League Cup relatively early and the way the FA Cup games are scheduled means you’re usually playing on a weekend so don’t get the extra complications on the schedule). I’ve spoken about Liverpool’s fortune this season and for sure, their key players have remained fit for the most part, but they’ve had a fair few injuries throughout the season too. There’s obviously a difference between a Nunez getting injured and a Salah getting injured, but every team goes through it. The difference between them and us is that all of our key players have gone down with lengthy injuries this season.

Like I say though, there’s not a lot more that Arteta can do I don’t think, other than what we should have done last summer and signed a proper out-and-out forward. If we’d have done that, we would certainly be in a better position points-wise than we are, but we still would have had the Saka injuries, the Odegaard injuries, the repeated Calafiori injuries and Gabriel out now too. Sometimes season’s just go that way.

My longer term worry is whether this is a sign that some of these younger players whose bodies were so robust two or three years ago, will now start to pick up more injuries. This is the first ‘big’ injury to Saka that he’s had in his career so far. Odegaard has been out for the odd game here or there, but not been as bad as this time around since he came to The Arsenal. Havertz was described as something like a ‘machine’ by his boss just before he got injured. So we’ve got a lot of players whose bodies have suggested that they would be available all the time, now not the case. Ben White I could through in to this now too. He missed a lot of time out injured, then missed the game this week on Tuesday. Is this a worrying sign of their future availability? We have to hope not.

There are some players with whom we will probably just need to accept are just injury prone players. Calafiori looks like he might be one. We’ve known Partey is, Gabriel Jesus is and of course there is the aforementioned Tomiyasu. I suspect next season at least two of those will almost be treated like ‘nice to haves’ and not expected to be relied on, one won’t be at the club and the other will be on season two at The Arsenal so that will be his chance to prove he can stay fit. But we’ve kind of just all accepted that players like Tomiyasu and Gabriel Jesus are not really in consideration any more. There’s an element of acceptance of that now so you almost discount them in your mind. But the others who have previously remained fit? That’s where my concern is right now. Can they shake off these longer-term injuries and return to the excellent form we’ve seen in the previous two seasons?

I guess if you’re going to go ‘glass half full’ on this discussion, you can point to Jurrien Timber as a positive case study. Picked up a pretty big ACL last season, missed the whole season, was eased back in at the end but this season has pretty much been an ever-present. That’s what we need to see from some of those normally robust players from the summer pre season. We need to see them all get good pre seasons under their belts and be ready to go. We also need to see some squad augmentation as well, but that’s for another day.

For now I will leave you with those thoughts of needing to see these players get back to their bests for next season. Let’s see what Arteta says when the teams news comes out from his press conference.

Catch you all tomorrow.