Season over for brilliant Ben White

Morning all.

I don’t like to start the blog with bad news but that’s what we’ve got this morning as a season-ending injury to Ben White was announced by Arsenal yesterday. In a statement on the official website, they said:

Further to Sunday’s match at West Ham United, subsequent assessments and specialist reviews have confirmed that Ben White has sustained a significant medial knee ligament injury, which will rule him out for the remainder of this season. Our medical team are now managing Ben’s recovery and rehabilitation programme, with everyone fully focused on supporting the aim of Ben being ready for the start of our pre-season preparations.

Firstly, it’s a real shame for the player who, despite some struggles with injury and consistency this season, was beginning to look like his ‘old’ self again. I thought he was really good in the second leg of the Atletico Madrid semi-final, and while there were other things at play on Sunday, his withdrawal certainly halted our momentum against West Ham.

He is someone who has, by the very literal definition, put his body on the line for this football club, and I think in many ways he’s someone who epitomises the Mikel Arteta era. There were eyebrows raised when we paid Brighton £50m for him, and on that opening day of the season – when the team was stricken with illness – he had a difficult debut against Brentford. As Covid swept through the camp, he missed the next game because of it, but I thought some of the punditry that day was particularly unfair on him.

Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher dancing with the Brentford fans was, perhaps, the start of a slide in the tenor of theirs and Sky Sports’ coverage. When you look back now, it’s rooted in a lack of professionalism and, because of how far Arsenal have come, goes some way to explaining some of how we’ve been covered over the last few years (even if, for example, Carragher’s Monday Night Football analysis of the Raya foul/VAR etc was good).

As Lewis pointed out in his newsletter last week, Neville in particular failed to see what was happening in quite spectacular style. In April 2022, he said:

My concern is if Arsenal finish fourth this season – which, to be fair, I think is 50/50, I still think there’s a long way to go in that race – but if they finish fourth, that’s in some ways as good as it gets.

Mikel Arteta is a brilliant coach. I love that we’re seeing a team that he’s getting the maximum out of – I can see exactly how he wants to play, we all can. But he gets to fourth [and] if he was really hard about it, he’d probably say ‘Right, that’s the best I can do there, I’m going now and getting my next job’.”

We didn’t finish 4th that season, we finished 5th. We endured that horrendous derby when Rob Holding got sent off, and then in the final game against Newcastle with a small squad down to bare bones, we lost 2-0 away at Newcastle. Ben White, who had been pilloried on his Arsenal debut (playing in a back four with Calum Chambers and Pablo Mari, btw), played that game with a grade two hamstring strain because we had so many players out injured and he tried his very best to help the team.

If Arsenal and Arteta were written off too early the punditry cognoscenti, so was he. The return of William Saliba meant he shifted to right-back, and if at first it felt like a way of squeezing him and the Frenchman into the side, it soon became apparent this was a serious step forward for this team. Saliba was, of course, brilliant, but so too was White outside him. A buccaneering full-back who got up and down the line all day. Perhaps not quite as effective from an attacking sense as someone like Trent Alexander-Arnold, but way better defensively, and that combination of White, Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka was so important for the title challenges in 2022-23, and 2023-24 in particular. His overlaps caused problems for the opposition, whether he got the ball and did something with it, or made space for Saka to hurt them.

When Jurrien Timber picked up an ACL injury on the opening day of his debut season (August 2023), we needed Ben White. Only Saliba, Gabriel and Declan Rice played more minutes that season. He made 51 appearances, of which 46 were starts, and in the modern game I think we sometimes underestimate just how incredibly physically demanding it is to play full-back. Especially for someone like Mikel Arteta.

You can’t help but wonder what might have been if that Timber injury hadn’t happened. I’m sure it would have helped us to avoid the cycle we found ourselves in when White had to take on the burden, and when he inevitably fell victim to injury himself, it was Timber’s turn until he buckled under the strain. Now Arsenal face ending the season without either of them available, with the Dutchman fighting his way back from what is clearly a difficult injury. The baton passes, albeit temporarily, to Cristhian Mosquera. Good luck, young man.

The other thing to say about Ben White is that because he didn’t fit into a particular archetype, he wasn’t taken as seriously as he should have been by those external to Arsenal. We all saw a brilliant player, and a great character who brought a lot to our team, but because he preferred doing other things than watching football he was dismissed in some quarters as not a ‘proper football man’. But his strength of character was such that he wouldn’t take any nonsense from Gareth Southgate’s assistant who tried to belittle him in front of his England teammates. Just because you prefer walking dogs to watching football doesn’t mean you don’t understand the game, as anyone who ever watched him play for Arsenal under a demanding tactician like Mikel Arteta ought to have realised. It showed that there was one person who didn’t understand, and it wasn’t Ben White.

The reaction to his England return this season was, sadly, fairly typical of the modern world we live in. The player bore the brunt from the halfwits and dimwits on the airwaves and in print, and thus the fans who should actually have been annoyed that a member of staff was the one responsible for denying their country an excellent player for so long.

So, it’s just a real shame that this season has ended like this for him. It’s cost him a chance to play a Champions League final, and in the final two games where, hopefully, the culmination of all the effort he (and everyone else) has put in over the years will result in a first title since 2004. It feels cruel that he’s been denied that, but football is so often like that, and it’s now the responsibility that he so willingly took so often lies with others. He may even have made the England squad, so there’s no World Cup either.

We’ve had some brilliant players in this era, but as absurd as it sounds for a man of my age to have a favourite, Ben White has always been that. A superb defender, a cheeky scamp and wind-up merchant who never crossed the line into nastiness the way others have, and someone who always gave everything he had for the shirt, even when there was nothing left in the tank. How could any Arsenal fan not connect with that?

We don’t know what’s going to happen in the summer, but I hope it’s not the last time we’ve seen him in an Arsenal shirt. Here’s wishing him a full and speedy recovery, and thanks for everything thus far Ben White.