Do Arsenal have enough players to see us through the international matches?

 

 

• Arsenal v Hull City: to rest or not to rest amidst the fog….
• Arsenal v Hull: looking after Rice and looking back at past results

By Tony Attwood

As I am not a gambler I have no idea what sort of odds you might have got on the Premier League table looking like this after ten games, but I suspect that even if you had just said, at the start of the season, that Arsenal would be six points clear after ten games, without citing the numbers, the odds would have been pretty good.

The odds on Arsenal having the best defense would have been less, given last season, but the odds on the top three defenses after ten games being Arsenal, Brighton and Leeds would have been worth a flutter.  I wish I had thought of it.

Of course it would be nice if we were not nine goals behind Brighton in the “goals for” column, and not just the fourth highest scorers in the league, just as it would be nice (in a very linked way) to be scoring two, three or four in each game, but then, if I had had to choose: “top of the league by six points after ten games or scoring the most goals” I would have opted for the present position.

And of course, there is a secondary bonus in all this – if Arsenal are getting more points someone else is getting fewer points – it rather seems to go both ways at once.

But just to look back on where we have come from here is what the league table looked like after 11 games last season…

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Arsenal	11	8	2	1	20	5	15	26
2	Manchester City	11	7	1	3	23	8	15	22
3	Chelsea	11	6	2	3	21	11	10	20
4	Sunderland	11	5	4	2	14	10	4	19
5	Tottenham Hotspur	11	5	3	3	19	10	9	18

 

And I would pause to note that Tottenham were indeed fifth after 11 games last season, and ended up 17th, just as they did the season before.   They are 10th at the moment so that would suggest that if they drop as they have in the past they will end up 22nd – which would be rather clever.

But back to Arsenal.   We have played 10 games and already got 27 points, so this is looking like real progress to me.   And yes I know about counting chickens and all that, but still, it is a cold and very foggy day where I live, so a bit of celebrating just how well Arsenal are doing helps warm me up a little.

The one thing that worries me a bit is goal scoring.   We are current at 15 goals scored and five conceded.   After 11 games last season it was 20 goals scored and five conceded – so we need to win the next game 5-0 to catch up.

Now as I read the charts, the next game is against Newcastle, who have so far scored 13 and conceded 16 so I suspect that winning 5-0 is going to be a case of pushing our luck a bit.  So I perhaps we should spend the next couple of weeks just enjoying the fact that we are top of the league, and hoping against hope that not too many of our players will get injured playing in internationals.

I have of course no proof that such a thing happens, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a black market in injuries going on with extra rewards handed out if an Arsenal player gets crocked on international duty just before an important league game.   Those internationals do seem to throw up and awfully large number of incidents which lead to players being unavailable for a week or two after playing for their country.

Of course it is inevitable that Arsenal are going to have a team full of players who “represent” their country and injuries do seem to come thick and fast, as they say, in those games.   (England play Croatia on 12 November, and there are of course multiple other matches being played by countries around this time, so goodness knows who is going to be available for the next Arsenal game.   We just have to have fingers crossed).

At present the only player who is shown as being injured and unavailable for selection on the usually reliable Premier Injuries site, is Saka, so it will be interesting to see what they record as we build up to the next Arsenal game – Newcastle as noted above.

Although it is hardly a positive thought, it is a fact that other clubs also suffer injuries with players going to internationals, and of course this makes winning the league something of a lottery.  However we do have quite a solid 23 man squad this season.   Keeping the number at 23 means that we do have two spare places for an emergency purchase if someone does get a serious long term injury, and it is fairly normal for clubs to stay at that level.