Kai Havertz’s injury leaves Arsenal with unpleasant truth

When Mikel Arteta returned from Dubai, after a trip to rejuvenate for his team, the Arsenal manager was poroned over different ideas to navigate a proper injury crisis. Arteta’s staff are great on math on the field and often run tactics through algorithms. Right now, it’s only a few simple sums that matter.

Arsenal did not sign a tip in January. It left an already low selection of attacking options for risk of injury. Now the worst has happened. Kai Havertz’s hamstring injury, which is expected to sideline the German for the rest of the season, means that three first -choice attacks are all out.

They have only three forwards available for the next few matches, and one is a burgeoning 17-year-old Ethan Nwaneri, with little experience. Moments like these are where you get that experience, and although there are vintage examples of young people who seize the opportunity to have the opportunity, it is an unreasonable amount of responsibility.

From this story, it has occasionally been said that title race ultimately turns on individual moments, those who carry the weight of a season’s accumulation of events.

Such statements are usually intended to mean crucial goals on the field. As for Arsenal’s challenge to Liverpool, however, this may be. The fact that the Havertz news leaked on the day of the leaders’ crucial derby trip to Everton only added the depth to it. Given these attacking opportunities, Arsenal may be more concerned with them under them and the Champions League places.

It also constitutes a huge depth of questions to Arteta and his club. The manager even talked about the need to keep everyone in shape before the Carabao Cup match at Newcastle United. This will now feel worse than that elimination.

In the short term, math ensures that it is almost impossible to see Arsenal keeping pace with Liverpool, so much less to review them.

They can come by with one or two games, but the real problem of situations like this asks the players to do more than can be expected quite expected over an expanded race. That’s when the drop-offs become clear. And this is at a time when Arsenal really had to be at their maximum without making a single mistake, while Liverpool suddenly hoped.

In the medium term, there is also the question of the Champions League Challenge that had been seen so potentially saved the season. Arsenal had worked well created, right down to players who came back fresh … so far.

There are then the long -term discussions that should be about how recruitment is combined with preparation.

Arteta now has to attend a very unpleasant fact. It’s not just that his entire front three is out of the absence of the absence of Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli. It is that they are all out with different types of hamstring damage. In football, these and quad injuries are usually taken as a sign of players being overworked.

It may be a natural consequence when your attack is already so thin. Nevertheless, the question will invite inevitable questions about the intensity of Arteta’s training, in the same way that has happened to Ange Postecoglou, Erik Ten Hag and countless other leaders who have been exposed to injury crises.

The large number of them shows that the new calendar has obviously not helped, and clubs had already marked this as the most intense January ever. It is on top of four years of overload. It must be recognized that Arsenal is not facing these problems last season, and Martin Odegaard’s ankle injury was not from fatigue. It was just a challenge and impulse.

Some of it still comes down to how to manage it all, mind. A player like Havertz, regardless of his physical abilities, has just played too much over a short period of time. There is now an obvious feeling with words from a source that some of this “avoidable”. Was there really a need for the most important attackers to play so many minutes in such a period? And what about the decision to sell Eddie Nketiah, who would be so valuable now?

That is why Arsenal could have done with even a loan agreement in January. Arteta was against bringing “a body”, but they now need it more than anything else. It’s worse that it seems so obvious now.

For all the emotional anxiety this will cause around the club, there was still some logic for these decisions. They tried to look at the bigger picture and five-year plans rather than just this difficult season.

It was a calculation, though it now looks like a gamble that has struck back that is in itself based on hope for no further problems. It now seems even worse as Arteta makes other calculations.

How Arsenal, created against Leicester City on Saturday, becomes educational. Instead of just playing the same 4-3-3, it is possible that Arteta leans more on its disproportionate number of midfielders and goes to a 4-5-1 with more attacking focus on Odegaard. At least it also spares some of the burden on Leandro Trossard, Nwaneri and Raheem Sterling. The latter will be unjustified to meet Chelsea on March 16 because of the conditions of his loan agreement, although Saka may have returned at that time. Trossard and Mikel Merino look ready for magic forms in the side as forward.

Some may say that it is just as good that they “only” face a relegation -threatened Leicester. It can work the other way if a strenuous attack does not score.

Similarly, Arteta will now fully lean into its usual response to these situations, which should be as positive as possible. He is aware that constant talk of injuries can have a negative impact on a team, so instead will point forward. It can often seem delusional, but it is part of the point: to close doubt.

Similarly, it is a little comfort for Arteta that February is a much less intense month in which Arsenal has no European matches and end it with another FA Cup break. If they can just get through these games against Leicester away, West Ham United at home and Nottingham Forest Away, they can then take status.

There may be hope that Saka and Martinelli will be back from their own injuries before then, but it will invite another calculation and potential dilemma. You will not rush anyone back after a situation like this. It can just aggravate the problems.

Getting through and taking status in that way has also felt the story of the season that started with such hope. For now, the title is not fully settled. The prospect of a race that using the language around these situations is nonetheless down to the bare bones.