Bizarre news for injury prone Arsenal. What will Steward Robson say?

By Bulldog Drummond

It seems almost years ago that we had the ceaseless, continuous wild ravings of those who took their lead from the frankly deranged Stewart Robson who ceaselessly claimed that all Arsenal injuries were caused by Arsene Wenger’s training methods.

Yet there are still aspects of the media that will give him time and space – such as TalkSport – but anyone even remotely in touch with reality will have known throughout that Arsenal did not have the worst injury record of any club, but did particularly suffer from a lack of protection from referees.

Quite how and why that happened we have explored in great detail with fulsome analytics, and of course the media who are committed to protecting the image of PGMO will have none of it.   But throughout our analyses of comparative injury figures the fact has remained Arsenal don’t have the worst injury figures, but they have often been singularly targeted with those targeting them abetted by compliant PGMO employees.

Here is the current list of injuries in the Premier League courtesy of physioroom

# TEAM How many down? Last man to fall What happened?
1 Crystal Palace 10 C Wickham Groin Strain
2 West Ham United 8 M Antonio Hamstring Injury
3 Huddersfield Town 7 P Billing Back Injury
4 Watford 7 M Britos Illness
5 Bournemouth 6 L Mousset Illness
6 Everton 6 I Gueye Hamstring Injury
7 Manchester United 6 A Young Knee Injury
8 Liverpool 6 A Lallana Muscular Injury
9 Brighton and Hove Albion 5 G Bong Thigh
10 West Bromwich Albion 5 S Field Calf Strain
11 Burnley 5 T Heaton Fitness
12 Newcastle United 5 J Sanmartin Mato Ankle Injury
13 Chelsea 5 A Christensen Muscle Injury
14 Manchester City 4 J Stones Conussion
15 Swansea City 4 A Rangel Groin Injury
16 Stoke City 4 E Choupo-Moting Groin Strain
17 Southampton 3 R Bertrand Back Injury
18 Leicester City 3 M James Achilles Injury
19 Tottenham Hotspur 2 H Winks Ankle Injury
20 Arsenal 1 S Cazorla Plantaris Injury

We’ll allow them Santi Cazorla as an injured player since he was added to the list of 25 players for the second half of the season, which he wasn’t in the first half, but of course we know the chance of him playing at all this season has been very low indeed.

Looking at a few more stats for the match against the alien hordes we see that Stoke have six games in which they have conceded zero this season, while Arsenal have 14.

What is strange is that Stoke have only have 42 yellow cards – that is six fewer than Arsenal.   Way out on top of the yellow league are of course West Ham who before this weekend’s games had 65.  Arsenal go into the match with 48.  Make of that what you will.

It will however not surprise you to know that only one team has fewer passes this season than Stoke, and that is Burnley.  Stoke have 10,794 passes recorded this season.  Arsenal are on 18,758.  We could even end up with twice as many passes as Stoke by the end of the season if this process continues.

Their danger man in terms of breaking legs and otherwise disabling opposition players is Joe Allen who has had an extraordinary seven yellow yellows so far.  The highest number of any player this season is eight.

Until 2002 Stoke were a club in League Two and they have crawled their way up the leagues since then and have reached 9th three times in their time in the Premier League and indeed in 2011/12 they actually played in the Europa League.  Word is that European clubs made it quite clear that they didn’t want to have to experience this sort of thing again, and they haven’t.

Before Saturday’s games they were however lurking the lower reaches…

Pos Club P W D L F A GD Pts
13 West Ham United 31 8 9 14 38 57 -19 33
14 Newcastle United 30 8 8 14 30 40 -10 32
15 Swansea City 30 8 7 15 25 42 -17 31
16 Huddersfield Town 31 8 7 16 25 52 -27 31
17 Crystal Palace 32 7 9 16 31 50 -19 30
18 Southampton 31 5 13 13 29 46 -17 28
19 Stoke City 31 6 9 16 29 58 -29 27
20 West Bromwich Albion 32 3 11 18 24 50 -26 20

So there is a chance they might actually be relegated this time, and possibly even start the descent to their spiritual home in the fourth division.   Although we should not be too unfair in this, for Stoke have won a few things off and on including the second tier (1933 and 1963) the third tier (1993 an 2002) and the Southern League (1910 and 1915).

Stoke’s next match is at home to Tottenham, and one can only hope that they will save their industrial tactics for that game, and avoid having anyone picking up a multiplicity of cards against Arsenal.

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3 Replies to “Bizarre news for injury prone Arsenal. What will Steward Robson say?”

  1. I see your mistake, you are mixing up sports journalism with facts. See how easy it is when you remember that they aren’t the same thing.

  2. For a site which spent a good few years preaching that the reason for arsenal’s poor results was due to its consistently high number of injuries, with Walter doing series upon series “proving” this fact, untold style. Then crowning this series by “proving” to us that these injuries were caused by the refs. To turn around and blame everybody and everything else and Stewart Robson for this perception only shows that the blog has no integrity.

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