I think I can speak for most Arsenal fans this morning when I say:

International football can get in the f*cking bin. And then that bin can be thrown in the sea.

Because you – like me I am sure – will be pretty cheesed off about the Martin Odegaard injury last night. He landed very awkwardly, there has been confirmation of what looks like an ankle sprain for the Norwegian (and our) captain and after the game Stale Solbakken said that in the dressing rom “it doesn’t look good”.

Balls.

Martin Odegaard is one of the key pillars in our team. He is an essential cog in how we progress the play and not only is he our captain that drives us forward, but he’s also a man that often leads some of our press, who’s passing range isn’t really matched in our team and has contributed towards goals and assists in each of our last two seasons. If he’s out for any length of time, it’s a huge blow for us.

Now all eyes turn to how bad it is and I suspect by the time Arteta has his press conference on Friday we’ll have an idea what type of sprain it is, but a quick Google search gave me an answer that depending on the grading of the sprain, we’re looking at anything from a week to potentially six weeks. If it’s the latter, we really do have a problem, because Merino is out for about six week’s too. That’s two big players for us but it is compounded by the fact that Fabio Vieira is in Portugal playing for Porto and Emile Smith Rowe is in West London for Fulham. I think most of us understood the Smith Rowe move, but the Fabio Vieira one now – with the benefit of hindsight – does look a strange one. Perhaps the faith is so strong in Nwaneri that he was seen as the de facto understudy to Odegaard, but giving a 17-year-old kid the keys to the creative engine is a lot of pressure that for me personally is a concern. He’s great, we’ve all loved what we’ve seen this summer, but if he is playing for the next six weeks, he’s going to have patchy games and when you are hoping to be fighting for a title, that’s a lot to ask.

There was a lot of talk last summer from pundits saying “yeah, well, they haven’t had any injuries, have they?” which of course was nonsense. But I don’t think anybody can label us with that now. We’re three games in to the new season and as it stands you can argue that for one of the biggest games of the season, we’re going in to it without a first choice midfield (Rice, Odegaard and Merino). It’s rotten luck and when you add to it the fact that we’ve had Tomiyasu out, Gabriel Jesus has been out and Calafiori was sent home from Italy at the weekend, this squad looks like it’s being stretched to its fullest.

And yet again I have to lament the very existence of international football. Why-oh-why on earth was there an international break after just three games? What is the point? The Euro 2024 final was just over EIGHT WEEKS ago. We had a whole summer of international football. Yet almost as soon as the domestic season starts there’s another pointless break shunted in there. I hate it with a passion. There will be some that will say “yes but there’s always been an international break during this time in the season”, but that is not a reason for there continuing to be one every season moving forward. This dressing up of glorified friendlies in the ‘UEFA Nations League’ is pathetic. And to add insult to (literal) injury, we had the Norwegian manager coming on Norwegian TV last night after the game chuckling and saying “I don’t think Arteta will praise me”.

You’re damn right he won’t praise you, you tw@t, because Odegaard reported with a knock and you and your medical staff should have been more sensitive about the welfare of one of your players. But instead you just laugh it off, throw him in to a pointless glorified friendly, chew him up and hand him back to The Arsenal medical team in pieces.

There might be some who suggest that if there was no international break this weekend, there might have been a Premier League game and he might have had the same problem in that match anyway, so perhaps it was fate or something like that. To that argument I say “bollocks”. Firstly, he’s had to travel which of course has it’s impact on the body, however minor. But secondly, Arteta’s motives would have been purer to assess his availability because he knows that if Odegaard exacerbates any problems he picked up the weekend before last against Brighton (we all saw him hobbling around and after he took a kick to the knee he wasn’t quite the same), then he misses him for longer than a game. A couple of season’s ago Arteta pulled Odegaard for the Brentford away game due to injury because he knew that it’s better to not risk it so you can get the player back the following week. Solbakken doesn’t worry about that. He knows that he won’t need Odegaard for another eight weeks or so until the next international break, so even if he has a knock, for him it’s worth the gamble on the player because he doesn’t have to face any consequences in terms of his job. Why should he care about a player he doesn’t have to see for another couple of months?

I suspect we can almost certainly rule him out for this coming weekend and suddenly, after just three games, we have a potential injury crisis brewing. The squad is already smaller in terms of first team players than it was last season and we’ve got – by my count – question marks or confirmed absences of potentially up to seven first team players. In September!

We’ll need to see what shakes out in the coming days, but when you add to it the fact that we’ve had one of the most difficult starts to the season in terms of fixtures that I’ve known, it’s all looking a little troublesome at the moment. Let’s just hope we can have some positive news in the coming days as we count down to the NLD.

Back tomorrow with some more ramblings.