Jonas Eidevall has confirmed that Vivianne Miedema will require ‘minor knee surgery’ after she had to pull out of Netherlands’ UEFA Nations League game against Germany this week. Miedema missed Arsenal’s games against Manchester City and London City Lionesses with a knee irritation.
She returned as a substitute in the recent victory over Manchester United before playing 45 minutes of Netherlands’ game against Spain last week. However, the knee irritation flared up again and a minor surgery is needed to clear up some scar tissue. Miedema had a similar procedure just before her comeback from an ACL injury in the autumn.
Arseblog News asked Jonas Eidevall about Miedema’s fitness this morning in his pre-Tottenham press conference. ‘She requires a minor knee surgery and that is going to have her off the pitch for several weeks. We will have an update on that after the surgery and when we see how she’s progressing.’
Eidevall said that Katie McCabe, Leah Williamson and Victoria Pelova, who have all had muscle complaints recently, are all in contention for Sunday’s game and Amanda Ilestedt is back with the squad after illness but won’t be ready for the North London derby. Arseblog News also asked Eidevall whether Swedish winger Lina Hurtig was likely to play again this season.
‘There is not any clarity on it, which makes that hard to predict when she will be able to return to play. So yeah, potentially, she won’t be returning this season, but we don’t know.’
Meanwhile, Michelle Agyemang picked up a knee injury on duty with the England U-19s during the international break but Eidevall says that issue does not look serious. ‘We don’t have any specific update yet, we don’t think it’s something that’s going to take her out for a very long time, but she is going to be sidelined for several weeks for it but hopefully not more than that.’
Asked whether Eidevall had any issues with how Arsenal players had been deployed during this international break, the Arsenal manager was sanguine. ‘We have good communication with all the national teams that we work with, but we also have to have a lot of respect for the autonomy in the decision-making. The Netherlands were playing some really important games for them – both for a Nations League trophy and maybe more importantly for an Olympic qualification, and they also needed to make the decisions that were best for them.
‘But what’s important in all these conversations is that I always think we put the player in the forefront and we try to find solutions that are best for the player and we need to cooperate. She (Miedema) doesn’t need the surgery because of those 45 minutes she played against Spain. She would have needed surgery anyway, so it was nothing that the Dutch team did that complicated or made the situation worse. It was a situation that needed to be fixed anyway.’
Australia boss Tony Gustavsson said that he did not start Caitlin Foord for the first leg of their Olympic qualifier against Uzbekistan due to ‘loading issues’, though Foord started the second game in Melbourne on Wednesday morning. Arseblog News asked Eidevall whether injuries in the full-back and wide areas for Arsenal have increased the burden on Foord.
‘Well, I think Caitlin was used in the first game for Australia. I think she played 45 minutes. And she played 15 minutes against Manchester United. So I think if there was any club that was de-loading the player, it was Arsenal. She played more minutes for Australia than we did in the last game. So that’s sometimes the decision that we need to take as a coach.
‘We know that on the fullback positions and the wide forward positions, we’re a little bit light, especially here with the Gold Cup and the unavailability of players because of that. In retrospect, it’s always easier to see who was going to be able to start and what not.
‘But what I think is very pleasing when I look at it, is how we work together with both players and staff. We’re constantly having these discussions. We’re trying to juggle that. It is really important for us to have good availability across the whole season and be smart with our decisions. And I think the decision to not load Caitlin as much against Manchester United was probably a really, really good decision and it probably enabled her to play more minutes for Australia as well.’
JE’s being quite diplomatic about Foord so I feel a bit churlish reminding everyone that he could have played Foord less and Lacasse more in this half of the season. But no harm done there, it seems. Good news about Pelova et al but Hurtig’s nightmare continues. And as for Miedema, that must be devastating news. These should be the best years of her footballing life and she is limping through them. It’s just bad luck, though – bodies are different and some people scar up more than others. The good news for us is that she probably won’t be… Read more »
Why wouldn’t Miedema be able to leave this summer? She should most definitely leave Arsenal, IMO, as she has been totally wasted by Eidevall and his idiotic assessment of her playing style as a CF–the playing style of one of the most prolific scorers in the game for 5 years…until Eidevall’s arrival at Arsenal. I think Viv likes living in London–and my guess is that she likes playing CAM, to a certain extent, because she likes touching the ball–something she didn’t get to do much in the big games in Montemurro’s last 2 years, because the roster wasn’t as strong… Read more »