Is Ben White all right?

Morning.

A quick Friday blog for you, starting with Arsenal Women beating Benfica 2-0 in the Champions League last night. It’s been a tricky start to the new season, but Tim has all the coverage/reaction from Portugal over on Arseblog News.

Back home, and we heard that Piero Hincapie has been training with the squad ahead of the trip to Fulham on Saturday. That’s good news, even if we are fairly well stocked on the left-hand side of the defence. He’s a player I’m keen to see in action, and with the amount of games we’ve got coming up, he’s certainly going to get minutes.

Apparently Ben White was not present for this session, which was weirdly described as ‘open training’. I’m not entirely sure why that is the case, it’s really only something we’re obliged to do before Champions League games, not the Premier League, so it’s a bit odd. Anyway, this has led to lots of speculation online about his fitness, and frankly I have no idea if this is something minor, major, or somewhere inbetween.

We may find out from Mikel Arteta later on, but I think it’s probably fair to say that he hasn’t looked the same since the knee surgery last season. He went under the knife in November, and although he did start some Premier League games towards the end of the campaign, his return took longer than expected. He started our first game of this season against Man Utd but was forced off with another knee injury, and those are his only Premier League minutes to date.

So, his absence from training is a bit of a worry in that context. I hope it’s nothing serious. He might have been ill or something like that, and until we have more information I’m not going to get too stressed. What I would say though, is that he is a player who has absolutely put his body on the line for this team since his arrival. I remember Rob Holding talking about how he played against Newcastle in the 2021-22 season with a hamstring strain:

When we played Newcastle away in the Amazon year, he would have had a grade two/grade three hamstring injury easily. His hamstring was shot to hell and he went out there and played.

He’s a mentality monster, I don’t know how he does it. It’s mental.

He did it that day because we had nobody fit, and we were scrapping for top four. It was a game in which we also lost Takehiro Tomiyasu and Gabriel to injury, and then you go to the season when Jurrien Timber picked up that ACL injury on his debut, and he basically played all the time. 51 appearances, 46 starts across all competitions (including EFL Cup), and only three players (Declan Rice, Gabriel, and William Saliba) had more minutes – and by Arteta’s own admission he was nursing a knee injury towards the end.

So, if there’s something going on now, it’s likely to be a consequence of that. All of that. I think fans can sometimes get frustrated with injured players a bit too easily, and in the case of Ben White I hope that people recognise how much he has played through the pain because we needed him to. This isn’t a case of someone’s poor lifestyle or training habits being the cause of their absence, it’s their 100% commitment to the shirt. Anyway, let’s see what the manager has to say about it later, hopefully it’s nothing too serious. Whatever it is, we’ll bring you the news on Arseblog News this afternoon.

I’ll leave it there for now, and don’t forget we’ll look ahead to our game against Fulham in detail in our preview podcast on Patreon. That should drop mid-late afternoon, and in the meantime there’s a brand new Arsecast below in which I talk with BBC’s Conor McNamara about his work as a commentator and lots more. It’s a great chat, so get stuck in.

For now, have a good one.