Morning Gooners and welcome to Wednesday. We’ll be on day two of the training sessions for the team and yesterday pictures emerged of day one, which included players missing like Havertz and Gabriel as we’d expect, but not Martin Zubimendi. Apparently he was training indoors as the club try to manage his load management which, when you look at the minutes he’s played this season, you can understand. He’s up there with Raya and Rice as those who have played the most minutes this season, having started 15 games with 1,319 minutes played so far. It will come as no surprise to him to have played so much; he’s a key cog in Arteta’s team and when he’s in the side we are clearly more fluid and have a more balanced structure to us. He is used to being that main cog; he played 2,962 minutes in 36 games last season for Real Sociedad and with 16 games gone in the Premier League, he’s on course for similar numbers for The Arsenal (if you extrapolate it up he’s trending to hit 3,132 minutes this season). But across all competitions last season he managed 3,955 minutes in 48 appearances, whereas this season in all competitions he’s completed 1,757 minutes across 21 games. If he’s going to play 55 games in all competitions – which I’d expect given how we are looking to go deeper in all competitions (as well as his Spain minutes) – then you’re looking at a potential of 4,601 minutes in 2025/26.

That’s a lot of football.

And given our injury record this season, I totally get that he might be training indoors, on a ‘light’ set of training sessions this week because as the games come thick and fast over Christmas, losing him is not something we want to countenance. And he’s also going to have to do something he’ll have never done before having never played outside of Spain until this season: no winter break. La Liga shuts down on Tuesday until 2nd January and under normal circumstances Zubi might be back home and resting up any weary bones. But this season in that same period he could feasibly play four matches:

  • Palace in the League Cup
  • Brighton in the Premier League
  • Villa in the Premier League
  • Bournemouth in the Premier League

Alright, technically Bournemouth is on 3rd January, but this is still quite a schedule and not something the Spaniard will be used to. So for him to be taking it easy and the club being mindful of the change at this time of year is a sensible one. I do wonder if they will manage his minutes at all over Christmas too. If – crossing everything as I say this and hoping for Christmas miracles – we can be winning games by a sdecent margin, I suspect he might be a candidate for an early exit in games. We have Norgaard, we have Rice, it kind of makes sense. But these matches will all be tight affairs I suspect, so I am just hoping that we can be sensible and if players look like they are struggling, we get them off.

We need some to come back though. I thought I heard some rumours that Havertz is targeting the remaining December games to be fit and of course there are still opportunities for him to train this week, but I doubt he’ll make Everton. If we’re lucky he might be good for a cameo at home to Brighton on 27th December, but given he’s barely played any football in 2025 as a whole, I suspect his minutes will be managed until the new year. That means an opportunity still remains with Gyokeres and Gabriel Jesus and they have to see this period as an opportunity they have to take. We can’t be seeing games in which Gyokeres is having five or ten touches and barely any attempts on target. Yes, we need to feed him, but he also needs to be in those positions to be fed. And he needs to anticipate better like the Saka opportunity that came across the goal in the first half against Wolves.

There’s an onus on him, there’s an onus on our creative players to spot the runs, which I hope is one of the things they are looking at this week. I’ll start to do my previews of the Everton game tomorrow, but you’d expect Everton aren’t going to play “park the bus” football at home in front of their own fans on Saturday evening. They’ll want to show that they can mix it with anyone and with 24 points and sitting ninth in the table at the moment, they’ve shown they are no slouch as a team. They’ve beaten Forest, Bournemouth, United (with a man down), The Scum, as well as Brighton at home. There’s some decent results against decent teams in there so we will need to be properly wary of their threat.

We’ve also got a pretty terrible record there of late too. Last season it was a 1-1 draw, the season before that we picked up a scrappy 1-0, but in the five before that we’ve lost four and drew one. Everton have a good record at home against us and we need to address that on Saturday – won’t be easy with the evening kick off getting the home fans all riled up and intoxicated with the last league game before Christmas.

But Arsenal and Arteta have themselves another two days of prep before they travel up on Friday, so my hope is that they’ve done all their homework, some of those things that Arteta had said had “deteriorated” through not training can be reset, then we’re in the best possible shape to do the business come Saturday evening.

I’ll be back tomorrow as we start to look ahead in a little more detail on what Everton will bring to the table from a tactical and statistical perspective.

Catch you all then.