Wenger makes surprising injury admission
February 6, 2012
All the papers this morning are raving about Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain after his two goal contribution to our thrashing of Blackburn. Not surprising really. It would have been nice to keep the young man’s talent a secret for a bit longer I suppose – keep the Ox in his Box – but with performances like that one it was never going to happen. The Ox has busted open the locks of Fort Knox and now he’s all over the box dressed only in his socks and his sister’s frocks. Oh yeah, those newspapers love a pun or a rhyme. Cocks.
From now on we can expect his every movement to be analysed and scrutinised, his positives amplified like he’s some sort of a god, so that at some point when he misses an open goal or gets a silly red card or gets spotted by the Daily Mail ‘going to a nightclub’ we can all point and go ‘ooh. Bad. That’s bad. We thought you were some sort of god or something and now you’ve been to a nightclub and it was a Tuesday and in our culture we abhor nightclubs so you’re evil, not a god at all but the devil himself. Shame!’
The attention is not surprising I suppose. He is after all English. Which means that he’s not even being compared to Messi or Ronaldo, he’s being compared to Stewart Downing or…Steve Stone. No wonder he seems otherworldly. And no wonder he’s being talked up for a place at the Euros.
His captain Robin Van Persie has been doing his best to quell expectations:
Alex is a big prospect. Everyone is enjoying watching him, I do, you do and he brings something extra to the game and people just love it. But don’t put too much pressure on him. You always have periods when you are young when you have really high highs, then you go up and down until you balance it a bit better.
He will have ups and will have periods when he is not playing so well, so my advice is to be aware of it and be patient.
It’s a nice try from Robin but I don’t think it will help. You can just tell how much Robin is enjoying playing with him. There’s an early understanding developing there and with Theo still playing his supprting role from the right, having the Ox chipping in too can only be good for RVP and Arsenal.
Arsene Wenger joined in the praise too but in doing so kind of managed to incriminate himself in The Great Arsenal Injury Mystery. Blog pages and column inches have been filled to the brim in recent years questioning who is to blame for our endless injury problems. Yesterday Le Boss gave us a clue as he warned against the dangers of overplaying Oxlade-Chamberlain:
That is what happened to us last year with Wilshere, it was exactly the same.
At the start of the season you think: ‘I will play him 20 games, maybe 25′, but after they deliver a performance, they play 45 and then they play for the national team and then they get injured.
There’s an odd sense of helplessness there in what he says. Like he’s not the man who picks the team. They deliver a performance and then they end up playing 45 (actually 49) games. There’s nothing you can do. Well there’s something you could do. He goes on:
It is very difficult to manage because people understand very quickly what kind of influence the players have and you want to win the game so you play them.
I don’t know where I have seen it, but 70% of the players who play very early in many, many games have stress fractures. In England the intensity of a game is higher.
I think I might know where he’s seen it. He’s seen it on the Arsenal training ground. Young players playing too many games and then suffering injury problems as a result. It’s a surprising admission of culpability from the boss but hopefully it’s a lesson that’s been taken on board. He’s been very careful with The Ox up to now. That’s partly due to him not being quite ready I think but also a desire not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But at the same time you don’t need to look any further than our own midfield to find another young player at severe risk of burnout. Aaron Ramsey, so soon after that horror injury, has played 30 games this season already. And we’re barely half way through. It’s too much football. Not only is it a risk to his long term health but we can see in the short term that his performances have suffered.
It will be interesting to see whether AW’s guilty confession will see Ramsey used more sparingly in the second half of the season, and more tellingly whether he’ll be able to resist the temptation to throw The Ox in for every game as he continues to improve. We shall see.
Not a lot else about today. There’s a story that Steve Bould could be in line for the assistant boss job when Pat Rice hangs up his dark specs at the end of the season. It’s possible I suppose in that there will be a vacancy and Bouldy as youth team coach would be a candidate but there isn’t much substance to the story.
Meanwhile Barcelona VP Josep Maris Bartomeu has denied rumours that the Catalans are planning to steal another one of our heroes away in the summer.
Nothing exists with RVP.
It’s rumours that appear in the papers. We’ve not contacted Arsenal, nor his agent.
Our focus is now on the Liga and Copa del Rey.
It’s necessary to be focused on the task at hand and not be distracted by the transfer market.
Absolutely right. You wouldn’t want to distract yourselves or Arsenal by incessantly talking about one of our players in the press throughout the season in an attempt to unsettle said player and force Arsenal’s hand in the summer.
That’s just not what Barcelona are about.
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Comments
11 Responses to “Wenger makes surprising injury admission”
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wilshere was over played, no doubt.
aw has to make sure this doesn’t happen to rvp or we’re fu*ked!
Why do Arsenal blogs always look for something negative tosay…
It seems that young players in England who peak to early are sort of finished by 28 or have a long injury a good example of this is Micheal Owen
Because otherwise they’d just be the same article every day saying how amazing we are and what great shape the club was in.
It would be just me writing the equivalent of a load of chants. ‘This just in. We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen’.
And some people would write in the comments ‘Troo! LOL!!’ but other people would be angry and write ‘No we’re not. Don’t be so blinkered. We’re sixth. There are at least five teams greater than us and that’s only this country, let alone the world.’
So I try to write honestly about what’s going on instead.
great HONEST article!
people need to get real and talk about the truth and real issues in the club instead on only talking about positives.
you learn more from making mistakes!
how is the club ever going to move forward if no one ever looks at the past in order to improve.
Marble and Fowler, yeah your so right, their were no positives what so ever on saturday.. Forget the 7 goals or what AOC or RVP did during the game the rest of of them were shyte…. Coqelin was shyte, Rosicky and Arteta also, Koscielny was out of sorts, I was perturbed to see Sagna back and I think walcott should be sold to the lowest bidder…. As I said previously, its easy to make headlines slagging off my team, but when something positive occurs I will never see it written about it here. I’m not blinkered at all, if anything its you muppets. Glory hunting plastic fanatics.
What are you so angry about? This isn’t the only article I’ve written about Saturday you know. I wrote a big piece yesterday about how brilliant we were. About how Theo doest get the respect he deserves. About how amazing the Ox is. But I can’t just run that article again every day, can I?
This article isn’t even slagging off the team. There’s a bit about how in demand the Ox is and rightly so. That bit slags off the press a bit and other England players a bit but I’m sure you can’t be angry about that. The rest of it notes that Wenger has admitted that he overplayed Wilshere last season and that this is what led to his injuries this season and hopes that he doesn’t make the same mistake again.
Just to reiterate, it’s not me saying that Wenger overplayed Wilshere and that caused his injury, it’s Wenger saying that. Am I supposed to just ignore that fairly major piece of news and just write another article talking about the goals we scored on Saturday?
By the way, even if I was slagging off the team, which I wasn’t, that wouldn’t make me a ‘glory hunting plastic fanatic’. You’re not a fake fan just because you can see fault in the way the team has been run and suggest improvements. You can’t just go round attacking any fan who isn’t entirely in agreement with everything that’s going on at the club. That’s ridiculous.
If I was a glory hunting fan I’d be writing a blog about Man United FFS. Not pouring out my anguish here.
And just to remind you, when I made a joke the other day about how getting nothing in the transfer window was a bit like Christmas except instead of getting a brand new Amiga or Atari ST you find out you’re stuck with a Commodore 64 for another year, you wrote in to suggest it was more like being stuck with a ZX Spectrum or a Vic 20. I thought that was a funny comment. But by your own logic here that just makes you a moaning glory hunting plastic fanatic.
I must have missed something… I thought it was well written and made valid points. Constructive criticism is always welcome. What is all of the anger about?
We’re perfect.. that’s why we’re sixth, is it? CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICIZING is welcome. stop howard webbing around please!.
The outsider. I think you should stay an ‘outsider’ haha.
Mate, everyone is welcome to their opinion. But if you have read the marble halls consistantly for the last 6-7 months on a daily basis you would see that this is one of the best blogs around. Hence why people read it day in day out.
Also like he wrote, he wrote a great article earlier in the week about the 7-1 win. But dont be fooled and blinded.
Blackburn. At Home. 10 Men. Nuff said.
We have just come off a massive flop in form with losses to fulham and swansea!!! So caution should be taken as this 7-1 win could last only until the weekend should a loss occur. Dont get too ahead with only 1 victory.