Awaiting Arteta updates : Koscielny talks Arsenal departure

Morning all. Apologies it’s a bit late today, but I’ve had some Internet issues at home this morning (still not fixed, but got tethering working after a nightmare of Googling and poxy AI summary responses which were about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike).

All eyes today will be on Mikel Arteta’s 1pm press conference in which he’ll be quizzed about the North London derby, but primarily people will want to know which of our injured players might be back to bolster the squad for Sunday and beyond.

We are looking for updates on the following players:

Kai Havertz: Last played – August 17th : Games missed: 16
Martin Odegaard: Last played – October 4th : Games missed: 7
Noni Madueke: Last played – September 21st : Games missed: 11
Viktor Gyokeres: Last played – November 1st : Games missed: 2
Gabriel Martinelli: Last played – October 26th : Games missed: 4
Gabriel Jesus: Last played – January 12th : Games missed: 44

Big Gabi we know about, and I don’t really expect Arteta to expand on the reporting we got this week in terms of his absence. There might be questions about him picking up the injury in a friendly though, but again, I suspect he’ll be publicly sanguine about that, even if he might be a bit frustrated internally.

As for the others, hopefully there’s some good news. Some are closer than others, with some suggestion that Odegaard could be available, but with a hectic schedule and Arteta’s predilection for injury related mind-games, I think we’ll get a lot of ‘We’ll see, we have to assess them in the morning and make a decision’ kinda stuff. It goes without saying it would be hugely beneficial to have some of these guys back, not just for the derby, but for Bayern Munich in midweek, Chelsea next weekend, and for the foreseeable future, all going well.

The other thing I’m interested in from the press conference is any hint as to who he might be thinking of to replace Gabriel. There’s no chance Arteta will show us his full hand, but the options of Cristhian Mosquera, Piero Hincapie, and Riccardo Calafiori are all quite compelling in their own ways, so if he has anything to say about this, I’m all ears. As ever, we’ll bring you the stories on Arseblog News.

Elsewhere, there’s an interview in the Guardian with Laurent Koscielny, who is now the sporting director at Lorient – the club we signed him from back in 2010. I still think it’s a shame he left under a bit of a cloud. The Bordeaux signing video, where he took off our shirt to put on theirs, was probably a little ill-advised, but hardly the crime of the century. It all felt like a very online storm in a tea-cup to me.

What I maintain is more interesting is why a player with a previously unblemished disciplinary record, who had been such a professional and always genuinely committed, refused to go on the US tour that summer. He doesn’t go into too many specifics, but says:

I was 34, I’d spent nine years at Arsenal and there had been a fair amount of discussions with the club. I wanted to go back to France with my family. There were deteriorated relationships with people at the club, although not with Unai Emery.

I have a special attachment to the club and to the city, my children were born there. I would have given everything for the club, on and off the pitch.

If it wasn’t Unai Emery he had an issue with, the only other person I can think of who had any decision making power around football at that time was Raul Sanllehi. Is it too cynical of me to think Koscielny was treated poorly, pushed to a kind of breaking point where he – as captain remember – refused to go on the tour and could then be painted as the bad guy, which then left Arsenal in a position where they absolutely had to go out and buy an experienced defender to take his place.

Coincidentally, David Luiz – who had just signed a new deal at Chelsea a few weeks earlier – was represented by Raul’s friend Kia Joorabchian, and ended up signing for the club in a deal which came under some pretty heavy scrutiny based on the numbers involved. Like I said, it might just be me being ultra-cynical, but it’s no less plausible than Koscielny just deciding to taint his 9 years at the club for no apparent reason. Maybe it’ll all come out in the wash one day, but while it ended poorly, I think Koscielny deserves to be remembered with fondness for his time at Arsenal.

It had ups and downs, obviously, but that was true of that era as much as any individual, and at a time when not everyone was as committed on the pitch as we needed them to be, he always was. How many times did he get clattered sticking his head in to score a goal or make a clearance? Even in the FA Cup final in 2014 he ended up hurt. His goal is sandwiched between Santi Cazorla’s brilliant free kick and Aaron Ramsey’s winner, so is a bit of a poor relation, but it was no less important.

Right, I’ll leave it there for this morning. There’s an Arsecast below if you haven’t had a chance to listen already, and we’ll look ahead in detail to Sunday’s game in our preview podcast over on Patreon a bit later this afternoon. For now, have a good one.