Mikel Arteta is awaiting news on the injury that forced Takehiro Tomiyasu off during our 1-0 victory against FC Zurich.
The full-back replaced Ben White on 73 minutes but limped off again with two minutes remaining after picking up an issue, and Arteta admitted that he swiftly decided to withdraw him as a precaution, hoping to avoid any further damage.
Speaking post-match against Zurich, he said: “We don’t know [what the issue is]. He felt something and we didn’t want to take any risks. With the amount of games that we’re playing, it’s part of it. It can happen in training, it can happen in games and unfortunately, it happened to Tomi today.
“The rest of the players have to be ready because we’re going to need everybody now. We have managed the load of the players in the last four weeks because of the amount of games that we have played.
“It is very difficult to get the balance and to get the right performances and win matches, and resting some players and keeping them fresh is always challenging, we have tried to do our best. Today we had bad news with Tomiyasu, but I think for the rest it has worked pretty well.”
On the plus side for Arteta was seeing Oleksandr Zinchenko return to the bench after missing the majority of October with a calf issue, while Mohamed Elneny was handed his first start since picking up a hamstring injury in August, and went on to play 63 minutes.
Reflecting on the Egyptian’s faster-than-expected return, Mikel added: “He was really good. He’s been out for eight weeks, we expected him to be out for 12 weeks, he had an amazing recovery.
“He’s a guy that has been pushing everybody around the training ground to be ready as quick as possible and today I think he competed really well.”
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
