Arsenal v Bournemouth – the Arsenal Injuries and extremely confusing qualification routes

 

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By Tony Attwood

I’ve been worrying about injuries on this site for the past week or so, but at last it seems we can talk about the numbers going down.   For in general terms…

Piero Hincapie and Mikel Merino are our long-term injured players, and each will be out for a while, but  Eze, Saka and Timber might be back sometime soon.   At least

The Sun says, “Mikel Arteta hopes to have Bukayo Saka and Jurrien Timber available for that crunch game at the Emirates, where a win will send Arsenal 12 points clear at the top of the Premier League.”   (Mind you, for the Sun, when it comes to Arsenal, every game is a crunch game.   Quite what a “crunch game” is I’m not sure, but Arsenal do seem to get a lot of them.)

So let us turn to our usual source of information – Premier Injuries   

Top of the league for players down and out, are Tottenham with ten, but I am still not sure why they constantly have so many players out.  Is it to do with the change of manager gong on so regularly?   Do their players just not want to play for such an awful team?   Thomas Frank, Igor Tudor, Roberto De Zerbi, and maybe another are out by the time you read this.

Below them, we have Burnley and Chelsea on eight each, Brentford on seven, and then we come to the clubs on five, which includes both Bournemouth and Arsenal.    Of these five Arsenal men, three could be up and running (literally) for tomorrow’s game: Eze, Saka and Timber.  The one thing I would say is that I suspect that any player who is more or less fit will be left out of this game and saved for the Champions League match mid-week.

We saw in the last piece that Arsenal are above Bournemouth both in terms of the whole season (obviously, since Arsenal are top) and the last six games.  But there is another table to consider, and that is Arsenal are at home and Bournemouth (rather obviously) away.

 

 

As we can see here, the gap between Arsenal’s performances at home and Bournemouth’s away from home is significant.   Bournemouth do clearly play for draws, but overall, their goal difference away from home is 34 worse than Arsenal’s at home.

Now at this point I could put the wind up everyone by saying that Bournemouth are unbeaten in their last ten games, and I would not be kidding you with that fact, but the reality is that the last five of these league games have all been draws.  And the goal scoring across all five games has been three goals each.

Now it is true that if we go back to the last ten games, Bournemouth have three wins – they have beaten Liverpool at home, Wolverhampton away and Everton away.   But the other seven have all been draws, and all these games have been in the Premier League.    Here is the full set of results…

 

Date	Game	Res	Score
19 Jan 2026	Brighton and Hove Albion v Bournemouth	D	1-1
24 Jan 2026	Bournemouth v Liverpool	W	3-2
31 Jan 2026	Wolverhampton Wanderers v Bournemouth	W	0-2
07 Feb 2026	Bournemouth v Aston Villa	D	1-1
10 Feb 2026	Everton v Bournemouth	W	1-2
21 Feb 2026	West Ham United v Bournemouth	D	0-0
28 Feb 2026	Bournemouth v Sunderland	D	1-1
03 Mar 2026	Bournemouth v Brentford	D	0-0
14 Mar 2026	Burnley v Bournemouth	D	0-0
20 Mar 2026	Bournemouth v Manchester United	D	2-2

 

While Arsenal have drawn seven games this season, Bournemouth have drawn  seven in the last ten!   And while we might think this is a trifle excessive in terms of Bournemouth’s approach, the fact is that, at least according to the TNT website  “Marcus Tavernier has hailed the impact of Bournemouth head coach Andoni Iraola, with the club pushing for a place in Europe for the first time.” 

Now yesterday the BBC ran a piece “How 11 Premier League teams could qualify for Europe” this being down to the newly invented, “European Performance Spots” which give extra PL places to the two leagues that have the best record in the Champions League. 

At this point, it all gets a bit too confusing for me, but you can plough through the BBC article if you like, and have a fair bit of spare time.   Indeed, if you really do want to read the article, I would suggest you might care to set aside half an hour or more as it does take us through a whole load of possibilities, some of which seem to look a bit unlikely to me.

But then it has never been part of Uefa’s remit to make things simple.

However, if you do understand all the ins and outs of the extra places and would like to write a comment or indeed a whole article explaining it in simple language, please do write in.   Comments, as usual, can go below, or send the article to me at Tony@schools.co.uk