Arsenal’s position at the top of the Premier League injury table

 

 

 

By Tony Attwood

• • Bournemouth v Arsenal: Bournemouth’s journey to the top league
  • Bournemouth and Chelsea: two clubs with the same problem, but different solutions

 

Now here’s a thing.   Bournemouth are above Arsenal in the injury table!  Or is that below?   I guess it depends which way you look at it.

In fact, Premier Injuries, the site I turn to for the data prior to each game, does not put clubs in order of the number of players injured, but if they did, it would read…

1. Arsenal: 4 injuries
2. Leeds United: 4 injuries
3. Brentford: 5 injuries
4. Liverpool: 5 injuries
5. West Ham United: 5 injuries
6. Bournemouth: 6 injuries
7. Brighton and Hove Albion:  6 injuries
8. Nottingham Forest: 6 injuries
9. Aston Villa: 7 injuries
10. Chelsea: 7 injuries
11. Everton: 7 injuries
12. Fulham: 7 injuries
13. Manchester City: 7 injuries
14. Manchester United: 8 injuries
15. Tottenham Hotspur: 8 injuries
16. Newcastle United: 9 injuries
17. Sunderland: 9 injuries
18. Wolverhampton Wanderers: 9 injuries
19. Burnley: 10 injuries
20. Crystal Palace: 10 injuries

Now, given that we are used to seeing Arsenal at or near the top of the injury table that is quite something.    Arsenal’s injuries are Riccardo Calafiori, Cristhian Mosquera Ibarguen, Declan Rice and Max Dowman.   The only one of these four players who might play this weekend is Decflan Rice, and he is rated at 50/50.  Max Dowman has no return date at all, the other two are down as possibly being available on the 14th of this month.

Now this really is quite an unusual twist to have Arsenal at the top of the injury league because they have the fewest men out – normally it is the exact opposite.   But what causes this variation?  I thought I might try and draw up a list of possible reasons.

1.   It’s totally random.  I’ve never been moved by this notion because Arsenal mostly seem to be near the top end of the injury league in terms of men out – I’m featuring this table because it is so unusual.
2.   Style of play.   This idea has been mentioned, and it is a possibility… it generally works around the notion that some players play in a way that makes longer-term injuries more likely, or indeed repeated injuries more likely, but I’ve not been able to find medical evidence written in a way a lay person can understand, which backs this up.
3.  Some players are targeted.  This is the old “they don’t like it up em” approach, which suggests that by doing some heavy tackling on particular players, the team will back out of challenges.   This can have two effects.  One is, it makes the squad less potent on the pitch, and the other is that because they are targetted they can indeed pick up more injuries.  Also, it can mean that the targeted player can be taken off and substituted more quickly, which can disrupt the opposition’s game.
4. Repeated injuries.   If you have been injured once, you’ll be injured again.   Certainly, many of us will know we have a weak spot in our body which we have to be careful of – the middle of the back, a knee, a tendency to bleed with a knock on the face etc.
5. Intimidation.  There is little doubt that some defenders aim to intimidate attackers with a few heavy tackles early on.   These might give away free kicks, but they also tell the opposing player, “There’s a lot more of these where that came from.”
6. Disbelief.   Some referees seem to think that certain players, or indeed certain clubs, overplay the impact of injuries in order to get the perpetrator yellow-carded.  Thus, some injuries are feigned to get the ref to change their minds about how bad the tackling of the other side can be.

There are of course, many variations on this, and we tend to see most of them each season – although it is noticeable that commentators generally shy away from the, “it wasn’t that bad” type of comment, and do tend to take most tackles at face value.

But the variation in the number of players injured within each first team squad is real – at the moment ranging from four to ten as we can see.   One can simply say it is down to chance, but I tend to think this is not the full explanation, given that there is so much money involved in Premier League football, that it is unlikely that anything much is down to chance.

What are, of course, particularly annoying are the injuries sustained playing internationals.  Compensation is rarely paid by countries back to the clubs who have lost their players, which means that international managers can be tempted to tell their teams to “get into” the opposition, which of course risks injuries on both sides.

For today’s game between Bournemouth and Arsenal, Arsenal have four men out with one who might play (Rice) and one who was very unlikely to have been brought onto the pitch (Downman).  And just one final point – different injury tables will have different numbers, seemingly because of the date on which information was gathered, and how players who are close to return are treated.   Thus at the moment, some charts will include Declan Rice as injured, and others not – so these tables are never definitive.

But for what it is worse, Arsenal are top (or bottom if you look at it the other way around) of the injury table.