Mikel Arteta has confirmed that Mohamed Elneny has picked up a serious injury, and says the club will try to make deadline day signings to bolster the squad.
The Gunners started Albert Sambi Lokonga for the first time in the 2-1 win over Aston Villa this evening, and the Belgian put in a good performance as we took all three points off Steven Gerrard’s side. However, with Thomas Partey sidelined as well as the Egyptian international, there is room for a signing to add depth to a key position.
Asked about Elneny’s injury, Arteta said, “That’s not good news. We still need to see another specialist, but I’m afraid we’re going to lose Mo for a while.”
What that might mean for the transfer market, with the deadline tomorrow night, the Arsenal boss continued, “Obviously that has an impact, because Thomas is injured and we are a bit short in that position.
“We have Sambi, we have Granit who can play in that position. We are just looking at options in the market.
“As I said, the club has been super supportive to try and keep improving the squad and the team as we can, and if the right player is there and we can do it, we will try.”
The deadline is 11pm tomorrow night, and as ever you can follow all the action on the Arseblog News transfer deadline day live blog which kicks off around 7am tomorrow.
Never fully understood why he did not try harder with Torreira…
You mean why Torreira did not try harder?
Torreira’s confidence was ruined by Dracula constantly playing him out of position.
“Good Ebening…” 🎩
🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇
He played in the right position in Italy and Spain but wasn’t deemed good enough
Fully agree, but I guess that’s in the past now, can’t do much about it.
He didn’t have the quality. Watched him a bit for Fiorentina last year and his close control is poor. He gets away with it in Serie A as he gets more time on the ball. There’s a reason he didn’t play at Atleti, Fiore didn’t take up the option and he is now in Turkey.
Because he never wanted to be at Arsenal from about 6 months into his contract. The poor baby got homesick.
Please try. We’re on the cusp of something very special. I love this team.
I cannot understand how no team has not made bid for tielemans. 25 million feels like a fantastic deal. There must be more to it.
In one of the interviews with Edu he talked about how they discussed “The Project” with each potential signing and how they needed to be on board with it and with what was required. He went on to say that there was one player who was only interested in their potential wages and how they would benefit. He used that as an example of a mindset they didn’t want. He didn’t expand on it nor did he say who it was but I always wondered if it was Tielemans.
Didn’t he mention Dortmund in this context? I thought it was Haaland
He said it was a Borussia Dortmund player…Don’t you people at least watch the full interviews? At Leicester, the players describe Tieleman’s attitude as how Zinchenko is – he’s always doing extra training, pushing himself to do better.
sounds like Vlahovic and/or one of his douche-nozzle reps.
Then it must not be £25M. Simple as that. If they’re holding out for £40M with only a year left, makes sense nobody is going to want it. Unless you’re desperate like either United or Chelsea.
Yep.
We desperately need cover at CDM, I’m not that worried about the attack even after selling Pepe, I have high hopes for Marquinos and obviously Smith Rowe is a special talent if he had a run of games. I’m also curious about the idea of Eddie and Jesus playing together, their work rate along with Gabi would be an absolute nightmare to defend against. I really don’t know who we could target for the CDM role at this late stage though? Bissouma would have been my choice earlier in the summer.
I suspect a deal has already been done as Mikel is being so forthright. Announce Fernandinho!
Caicedo
surely he could’ve kept his cards closer to his chest for a few more days instead of letting everyone in the market know we’re desperate for a midfielder?
We’re top of the league after a perfect start, desperate is not the right word.
Short term, no.
Long term, yes.
It’s a long time until the January window and we’ve got less than 24 hrs to sort out a decent DM.
It should never have had to come to this. I thought the days of trolley dashing were over for this club.
What a ridiculous overstatement.
Yes Elneny being out is a problem, hopefully Partey’s injury isn’t too bad (yes I know we can rely on that with his record).
Sambi played well, Xhaka can fill in.
Yes we do probably need another body in there but it’s not the end of the world.
With a very solid back 4, I don’t think it’ll hurt us as much as last season when we also missed our strongest fullbacks. Plus we have strikers who can hold up the ball and score this season it’s almost like playing with 11 men instead of 10.
Funny that after all these years we’re once again in a deadline day scramble for a DM, feels annoyingly familiar!
I couldn’t watch the game tonight, could Sambi do this long term?
We also just added £10m to the asking price of any prospective signing in “desperation tax”.
Seems odd to announce the severity of Mo’s injury?
The pressure is for our lads in charge
Sambi played well. He actually fared much better than I hoped, and I think he has the potential/ability to progress the ball far better than Mo. He’s not the finished article, and he’s definitely several levels below Partey, but I think he has real potential, and he never hid away from the ball. He had a couple of lovely turns into open space, and sometimes just lacked the final ball. It’s not ideal, but he’s certainly up to the job at Europa and lower half of the Prem level. I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable if he was heavily under… Read more »
I feel exactly the same. At Liverpool away last season, it looked like they targeted Lokonga specifically – almost as if they saw that he was the weak link.
Up until that game Lokonga was playing well and looked like he will stake his claim as a starter. The Liverpool game was a chastising one. Unless he has shown improvement since then, we should look out for a signing.
Sambi was fine. Actually he was one of the coolest, calmest players on the pitch – he was playing the simple pass and finding his man with all the experience of a seasoned pro.
Let’s just hope he can keep it going, because we’re going to need him to.
I don’t hold much hope with Edu and Arteta’s trolley dash today.
It’s probably bad form to be critical after a win… but I think Arteta is still learning how to make game-changing substitutions. We need that to become even more dangerous. When games are usually close like this, he takes a while to make changes or is reluctant to make attacking changes. Almost as if he is afraid to switch up things until very late and He starts throwing in the likes of Holding. I am afraid this can lead to burn out for a lot of our players. I don’t think it would have been bad throwing in Vieira for… Read more »
I thought putting Eddie in was a great decision. We bossed the possession all game and we needed the defensive bolstering (aka Holding) to see it over the line. I wish he had done the ESR swap for Martin about 10 minutes before it happened, though. The ref certainly didn’t do us any favors but we overcame it.
i kinda worried about ESR tho, he’s defense is really bad, his marking is not tight enough & he doesn’t follow the running the player he’s marking. really really worrying….. anyway is it just me or the player’s kinda reluctant to pass to Gabriel ? afraid he does another mistake? lol it’s so obvious, i just don’t know if it was ordered (by coach or by Gabriel himself) or is it done without consciousness 😉
After the hard tackle, that made him lay down for a minute, Ødegaard was visibly impaired. I hope it is not serious.
Fully agree. It could come and bite us. Seems he’s afraid to jinx what’s working, but then the players that come in when we’re forced to play them are even under more pressure to perform, as the opportunities are rare for them.
I don’t know why you speak as though you have a coaching license, you’d be the first at his throat if he made a sub too soon.
He trusted the players, they delivered didn’t they? Why are people losing their minds over Viera and ESR not playing, what’s wrong with easing them in, there is going to be a LOT of football to be played really soon
So, we are not allowed to comment on games if we don’t have coaching licenses?
It’s easy to ignore right now because we are winning games. But there’s still a lot to improve in terms of substitution and player rotation. Allowing one set of players to play over and over again with very little time given to a few others from off the bench will lead to fatigue for us faster than other teams.
Not sure about that. He brought on Tomi after an hour and we continued to dominate. Villa literally offered nothing of substance. My thought was that if we kept playing the 2nd, 3rd, Nth goals were coming. Everything was working well up until the final kick. No need to change anything at that point in my view. Did people really think we should have made changes at that point? Suddenly Villa scores after what, 75 minutes? I think the right strategy at that point is to push harder for a goal. 100% of the time we’ve conceded this year we’ve… Read more »
Still playing with the handbrakes on slightly.
You sound like that daft bird on BT4. I watched the match recording when I got in from the game last night and she was great entertainment. For an ex pro, she sounded remarkably obtuse. First Keown had to correct her when she stated that we “hadn’t won a trophy for a long time” (wrong North London club, love) and then her parting shot was that we should have been more ruthless. If she’s an ex pro, then she should understand that as long as a team makes chances, it will win football matches. And we have. I don’t know… Read more »
Subbing Eddie and ESR on earlier would have made that 2nd half easier. Jesus, Saka and Ode were looking very tired around the 60/65mins mark due to the intensity of their pressing all game. Saka still came up with an assist but how many times did we have the ball down their end only for the ply to breakdown with not even a test on the keeper? Passes going astray and tunnel vision for goal when a pass was on became a theme. Thats when you need to sub. Nevermind 3 points in the bag, and another strong showing overall.… Read more »
Arteta’s forthrightness is refreshing and reassuring. No tongue in cheek when it comes to what we want to do in the market. But I do wonder why coming into the new season it wasn’t clear to him and Edu that TP is officially injury-prone and his absences disrupts our momentum at best and at worst cost us vital points! We missed 4th place more due to his absence than any other thing else. So this CM business IMO was always a bigger priority than finding more “firepower” on the right wing given we have Viera, marquinho, Reiss all who may… Read more »
I think Elneny was considered very fit and resilient. So this injury has scunnered them a bit. If they can’t get a signing in on time maybe white or zinchenko will cover as Sambi develops.
Think White could do really well there, yes, and Zinc is already proven as CM.
True. But with all due respect to TP, his incessant injuries always implied 2.5 persons not 3 (of TP, ME and Sambi perhaps) in that position and in a season of 50+ games at a minimum. Besides, even tho Sambi had a good game today, there will be games wherein his inexperience would be exposed. We needed another CM like yesterday
Was pretty reassured by Lakonga tonight but still need to strengthen there.
Get it in! Great game tonight, and Sambi did well, won some great challenges, but maybe a little slow moving the ball. We need that strength in depth.
Elneny contract extension was a stop gap to give us time to lay groundworks to bring in a quality long-term player, but now that’s being rushed and people crying out for a player that isn’t out there for us or not feasible.
Solution is to bring in a loan signing.
Odegaard worked out, Ceballos was great initially also and we weren’t left with a liability when he fell off.
Why don’t we make use of loans more often like we should have done in January?
In fairness Ceballos was shit. If we can find late loans for the equivalent of a Denis Suarez or a Kim Kallstrom, I will be so happy
He wasn’t initially when we went on to win FA cup. Denis Suarez was awful man, but we didn’t end up with the liability.
I think it would be much better to risk £5-7m in loan fees with buy option on a player that is decent. If he does well, buy him, if he doesn’t, at least he provided cover.
It’s a joke lads
We’re a suspension or further injury away from a real problem in midfield. Tielemans now becomes a necessity.
With Tomi coming back at right fullback, would it be possible to slip in Ben White as a CDM?
From a first team perspective that switch might work for a bit, but as far as squad management goes we’ll be relying on a more and more limited amount of players with every passing week (with fixtures massively piling up). The great thing about our start to the season was that we had the squad size to ease players with fitness issues like Tomi and Kt back into the team slowly. In a matter of days that pictures already drastically shifted, and we can’t go further in that direction in a season like this. A midfield signing (and ideally one… Read more »
A wise decision.
What about AMN?
This is when we will know kroenkes ambitiousness, time to open the purse and support, mancity have lots of defenders, but when injury hit them there, they acted, we need to reinforce with 2 signings, no question about that, else we’d keep going in circles, if we get this 2 signings we spend about 70m pounds max, they give us champions league qualification, we get 45 – 55 m pounds, it pays itself, if we don’t, we remain in europa league word, over to you kroenkes