Morning all.
Arsenal announced yesterday that Martin Odegaard sustained a medial collateral ligament injury to his left knee during the first half in Saturday’s win over West Ham United. It’s a common injury in contact sport and occurs when the knee pushed/knocked inwards, towards your other knee. In Odegaard’s case, his knee collided with Crysencio Summerville‘s knee with him coming off worse. Sod’s Law eh!
Whether our captain will need surgery or not remains to be determined but having read about this type of injury online, if it’s not a bad one, he could recover quite quickly.
Better news for Declan Rice as his bad back isn’t bad enough to keep him from going away with England although I’d like to think Thomas Tuchel will use him wisely. Same with Bukayo Saka, Myles Lewis-Skelly and Eberechi Eze. England are playing Wales and Latvia with only the latter being a competitive fixture.
I read somewhere that Tuchel has suggested that Lewis-Skelly not playing regularly for Arsenal could affect his England career long term.
It maybe become a problem for him, yes. To just be a good citizen in camp will not be enough over the course of a year. He was a very good player in camp, a very good team-mate in camp. But to just be a good team-mate can maybe not be enough to stay the whole year with us.” Of course, you have to perform at club level on a regular basis. At the moment, in the last camp he got the credit that I was convinced we have to take care of him and nominate him, because we accelerated his career.”
“It was our responsibility to call him into the camp in the first place at the end of last season. He was now part of a very successful camp, so he gets the reward. But, as you remember, he was not part of the 20-man squad in Serbia.”
Personally, I find Tuchel’s view bonkers. On one every football fan wants to see their club manager rotate his players regularly to avoid fatigue and injury then you have an international manager suggesting otherwise. What is it with international managers who think they can put such pressure on footballers? Perhaps in this case, Tuchel should concentrate on his England job and squad selection because watching his team play is about as boring as watching paint dry!
A bit like Man City were yesterday by all accounts as they huffed and puffed their way to a 1-0 win against Brentford. Newcastle won the rugby match at St James Park between themselves and Nottingham Forest piling more pressure on Big Ange early in his new job and in the other games, Aston Villa beat Burnley 2-1, Wolves v Brighton ended 1-1 but the shock of the afternoon was at the Hill Dickinson Stadium where Everton beat Crystal Palace 2-1.
That’s this league for you though, any club/team can beat another if it’s their day and it was certainly Jack Grealish’s day.
Catch up in the comments…
Good morning Rico.
I would guess that we are unlikely to see Odegaard in action before Christmas. Knees are complicated joints and can take ages to heal. I have done medial ligaments in both knees due to skiing accidents and was off work for months in both cases.
Tuchel is locked into just one thing, The World Cup, win that and the World is his oyster. Player welfare is way down his priority list.
Just as well we bought EZE then and maybe this is Nwaneri’s chance for minutes. All we need is for them all to come back from international managers unscathed.