By Tony Attwood
As ever with injuries, I defer to Premier League injuries, which seems to keep up to date with the ever-fluctuating world of knocked-about players better than most. Although today, I have spotted a slight inaccuracy in their numbers. I will come to that further down the page.
But what they don’t do (unless I am not looking in the right place) is compare Arsenal’s situation with other Premier League clubs in terms of the origin of each injury, and I think that is an issue missed. This is not because I want to blame the injuries each club gets either on the decisions of the planer’s manager, nor on the aggressive nature of the players in other clubs (who might on occasion be ordered to hurt someone from the opposition eaerly in the game, if all other strategies fail), nor on the over exertion of some players, nor indeed on bad luck. It could be any of those, and in most cases, it is.
However, it is curious how some clubs seem to get fewer injuries than others, and in the end, I think we can trace this back to two main issues.
First, where a club knows it is conceding too many goals and does not have any fair way of stopping the goals against tally from rising further, then chopping down a player can be the best option, most certainly if a) it hurts the player and b) the result is nothing worse than a yellow card.
Second, the ability of some players to move the ball quickly to avoid being caught by aggressive defenders seems to invite bad tackles. It should not, but it happens.
Third, the inclusion in the team of a player who is so fierce that no one wants to be challenged by him, and so his mere presence on the pitch is just as effective (maybe sometimes more effective) than having a better player in that position.
None of this explains why some clubs (for example, Tottenham Hotspur) constantly have more players injured than others. Is it that every other club thinks, “Tackle Tottenham players hard – they don’t like it,” or is it that referees don’t penalise tackles on Tottenham because they think Tottenham players play-act, or could it be that Tottenham players keep getting caught with the ball?
SpursWeb recently ran an interesting article on this, which said, “although the severity of this season’s situation is undeniable, the pattern of injuries plaguing Tottenham is not a new phenomenon. In fact, this concerning trend can be traced back over five years, suggesting deeper underlying issues within the club’s setup.”
Which is interesting, but it leaves us with this factor: Tottenham keep changing their manager, and this article seems to suggest that manager after manager can’t stop the trend. I obviously don’t want to help them with suggestions of how to improve (not that I have any), but it is interesting how different the number of injuries per club are.
For Arsenal today, Merino and White are definitely out. Odegaard, Rice and Havertz have late fitness tests and are all assessed as 50% in terms of their chances of playing. Raya has been ruled fit, but is still showing in the totals below, which come from Premier Injuries. Why that is I don’t know.
The range of injuries at the moment for clubs we are currently interested in is large….
- Wolverhampton Wanderers: 1
- Brighton and Hove Albion: 3
- Manchester City: 5
- Manchester United: 6
- Arsenal: 6
- Chelsea: 8
- Tottenham Hotspur: 10
And of course one can invent all sorts of reasons for this range. Training methods, players pretending their injuries are worse than they are because they don’t want to play for this manager, players pretending their injuries don’t exist because they do want to play, players being targeted by other teams to get them off the pitch, pure chance…. think of a reason, and it could be an explanation.
But we have become so used to this variation that we don’t talk about it much even though the statistics are utterly bizarre. Tottenham Hotspur have twice as many players injured as Wolverhampton! Why? Is it because Tottenham players feign injury because they don’t want to be associated with this failing team? Or are Tottenham just unlucky?
That sounds a bit bonkers, but then again, just look at the last six games table as it stands today…
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manchester City | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 12 | 4 | +8 | 16 |
| 2 | Manchester Utd | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 12 | 6 | +6 | 16 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 16 | 5 | +11 | 14 |
| 20 | Tottenham Hots | 6 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 7 | 14 | -7 | 2 |
Of course, one of the things we need to remember is that every club is different, so some clubs might have an atmosphere in which every player wants to play no matter how bad their injury, while in another club the players like to avoid playing so that they are not associated with failure.
Up next: the team selection.
