The midweek international fixtures have come and gone and yet again, the club will suffer as players pick up injuries from these matches. It wasn’t too long ago that we lost key players like Robin Van Persie, Jack Wilshere and Tomas Rosicky due to their participation in these meaningless international friendlies.
Now it is reported that both Laurent Koscielny and Aaron Ramsey will report back to the team with groin injuries which will keep them out of the team for the weekend match against Sunderland. Koscielny hurt himself playing for France in their 2-1 defeat to Germany while Ramsey didn’t even get to the field after suffering the injury during training with Wales. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get news of more injuries as players report back tomorrow. In particular, the English duo of Wilshere and Walcott, who performed admirably against Brazil but suffered quite a number of knocks along the way.
The Koscielny injury is particularly worrying as Thomas Vermaelen is already out injured. If the Frenchman cannot make it back in time, we might have to resort to having Sebastian Squillaci partnering Per Mertersacker in the center of defense. I am sure this possibility must be sending chills down every Arsenal fans’ back. I hope this does not happened because we need all the points we can get from the league and having this central defensive partnership is just a disaster waiting to happen. Personally, I would rather play Bacary Sagna in the middle and Carl Jenkinson right than see Squillaci play.
With Arsenal having a run of very winnable games, it is imperative that we get maximum points from these matches so it would be wasted if this was ruin by a bad central defensive partnership.
