By Tony Attwood
Arsenal are currently sitting on three injuries, Dowman, Saliba and Timber, and those last two don’t seem to be deeply damaged and may even return for this weekend’s game.
Now, three is a particularly low number of injuries to report – the only clubs with fewer injured players (in each case two) are West Ham and Wolverhampton Wanderers. And those two clubs show us that injuries or the lack of them may well not be a good way to understand a club’s position in the league. The quality of the backup players seems more important.
At the moment, it is Tottenham who are right out when it comes to injuries with nine players listed as injured, which, of course, may be an excuse for them to once again find themselves in the lower reaches of the league (14th to be exact).
That run of injuries might have explained Tottenham’s eight games with only one victory – in that such matches can lead to desperation and risk-taking – but even so, any club with the seemingly endless PR resources that Tottenham has at its disposal ought to have a backup squad that can cope with those numbers of men down. Or maybe someone else in charge of training and tactics – unless they are claiming that the rest of the league’s teams are universally out to get them.
Back at the start of November, “Give Me Sport” published a list of the total number of injuries suffered by each club in the league so far, and that list placed Manchester City at the top with 21. Arsenal were fourth with 18. Manchester United were bottom with eight. Which seems to suggest that, for most Premier League teams these days, there is a fair amount of cover for each position.
But the problem is of course, that really good players don’t want to sit on the sidelines all season just waiting for someone to be injured, which is why clubs do rotate a bit, and do use the League Cup and some FA Cup games as a way of giving players who have been sitting on the bench a bit of a run out. Although that might not be that much compensation for not much on the pitch all season.
Of course, in the past, there used to be reserve teams playing in their own league, although this mutated into the under-21 league. Thus, most injured players now recover via practice matches organised also within the club. However, there appear to be 45 players in the Arsenal under 21 category (where there is no limit on the number of players that each club might have).
But Arsenal still have only 21 players in their first team squad, which reveals the problem with the system. While the backup keeper knows his lot and expects to spend the season on the bench, playing a handful of cup games, outfield players expect more of a chance on the pitch. Filling up all 25 allowable places in the squad with players who will never play doesn’t help the club or those players, for it tends just to fuel discontent and reduce other players’ willingness to join the throng. Arsenal and other teams have thus, over the years, put more and more effort into recruiting and looking after under 21s who can step up if injuries in the first team demand, while giving them games (or at least bench time) where possible.
Now of course, under 21s – and more particularly their parents – can be very sceptical about promises made by football clubs, and they will know how youngsters can be promised the earth only to spend a season on the bench and playing a few reserve games in front of crowds of 1000 or so. So they tend to encourage their offspring to move to clubs that are more likely to look after them in their late teens. Which in turn is why the bigger clubs are more and more loaning out their youngsters to lower league teams to allow them to get a few games.
For the highly talented youngsters who are not quite at footballing genius level, that is still a great problem – and Arsenal have done well of late, in my view, in terms of showing that they will bring young players into the squad at ever younger ages. It is not by chance that this season we have seen the youngest-ever Arsenal player on the pitch.
But at the same time, injuries remain unpredictable. It was only a few weeks ago that the media were full of stories about Arsenal’s mega-crisis in terms of injuries. Now the injury kings are Tottenham with nine, leaving people starting to wonder why Tottenham get so many men down. Are they all being kicked by the opposition, or is something else at play?.
