GYOK IN THE DOCK

BIG DEBATES PLUS SOME BIG DATA!

I wasn’t prepared for it. I landed in England, no shower, no sleep… straight into a full-blown battle over the merits of Viktor Gyökeres with my Arsenal family. A fierce ambush. The passion is high for this man. But the fact the battle is raging tells you all you need to know about how this summer signing has gone down so far.

This won’t be a full-blown blog debate about the Swedish striker, but you’d be hard-pressed to deny that he’s on the struggle bus, trying to push a lot of weight up a very steep mountain.

It’s also hard for the fan club he has to rationalise what is happening here.

If the anger is that he doesn’t get played in behind that often, then you can simply point out that we’re mostly dealing with deep blocks.

If it’s upset that players don’t pick out his runs, then you should probably go a layer deeper and ask why world-class players are missing the runs. I’m quite sure it’s not because they’re incapable of seeing them.

This Arsenal attacking unit right now is one of the best we’ve seen under Arteta.

• It can and does go over the top…

• It can find the back post in open play…

• It can be cute in the penalty area…

• It finds forwards with cut-backs…

• We are set-piece masters…

There are no real weaknesses in our attack, bar not having a Haaland… or a mini-Haaland.

At some point, you have to ask:

1. Is this blog post going to be all about Big Vik despite me saying it wasn’t?

2. If you’re playing for a team that is top of the Premier League and top of the Champions League and you’re not scoring goals… might you be the problem?

Now, I win in all situations here. If Big Vik flops, I look like a visionary. If he bangs in 16 goals from now until the end of the season, we’ll probably win the league, and only the Le Grove sickos will pull me on it. Then I’ll take away their commenter privileges and send a message that on this blog… I am always right.

Average banter aside, I am worried for the Swede. This Everton game at the weekend represents one of the last chances he has to prove that Gabi Jesus, Mikel Merino, and Kai Havertz are not going to replace him in that striking position.

I do LOVE that last paragraph because it shows how far forward we’ve moved on depth. We basically have four options in the #9 position, all slightly awkward and below the elite need, but they are options nonetheless.

• Kai Havertz: Power, pace, aerial threat, OOP monster.

• Mikel Merino: Great finisher, aerial beast, big-game player.

• Gabi Jesus: Small-space genius, can create chances for himself, defender magnet.

• Viktor Gyökeres: OOP beast, super finisher (I think).

If you could merge the best bits of Kai and the best bits of Viktor, you’d have one of the best strikers in the world. But sadly, this sort of tech is NOT yet out of testing, so we’ll have to makeshift it all the way to the future.

Just some little bits to tidy up.

Man City showed Arteta the way with a heavily rotated starting XI for their Brentford quarter-final last night. They won the game, changed seven players, and exited with just one injury: Oscar Bobb. That’s the sort of no-drama evening I’d like to see for Arsenal. A cup final would be lovely, but for me, if we’re rolling out serious players for this, we’re going to accumulate more damage, and it’s quite simply not worth the juice in a very important season.

Arsenal are on the precipice of something truly great right now… a fully fit squad. We really can’t be seeing Arteta take that as a cue to obliterate it with a bunch of silly ‘I had no choice’ starting XIs.

I did really enjoy this article underwritten by Howden Insurance Group in The Athletic. It’s a really detailed analysis of how injuries impact clubs around Europe.

Headline points for me were that injuries are down 25% since 2021-22, but the severity of injuries is actually up 30% (out longer). This line really captures the heart of the problem:

‘This rise in severity aligns with reduced recovery windows, cumulative fatigue, and the increasing density and sequencing of elite competition for a selection of teams’

Yeah, that quote from Dr Robin Thorpe hit deep and sums up where Arsenal have been and possibly are. We’ve only recently entered the chat with a deep squad and have a lot of pain associated with cumulative fatigue. The real worrying trend this season has been that we’ve seen Arteta gifted a bigger squad, but similar issues occur… and certainly more occurrences of training-related issues (Big Vik / Saliba / Gabi before he left).

This part was also interesting:

Under-21s have proven particularly susceptible to injuries. Increased minutes for youngsters has been an upward trend in recent seasons, and they have the greatest injury severity of any age group, indicating the challenges in making the physical jump from academy level.

I was told that Arsenal did a lot of work over the past eight years on building the robustness of academy prospects, starting as young as 11-12 years old, putting them on tailored programmes to ensure that by the time they were ready for the big time, they were robust and strong enough. Proof is in the pudding with players like Saka, MLS, and Ethan just slipping in and handling it. Even Max, who is currently injured, seems to have no problem making the step up.

The above graph shows how Arsenal were slapped by the injury gods last season. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the only weakness Arteta has as a manager right now is this… and if he doesn’t get to grips with it, he won’t win the major trophies he wants, extract the max out of the Arsenal investment, or cement legend status at the club he loves.

What I love right now is that the issue is in the broader Arsenal fan conversation now. People don’t like to hear about it before bad things happen, but when the consequences invariably play out in an unnecessary way… like they did with Ben White… no one is cursing luck, they’re cursing the manager who made the choice.

Still, it does appear that some of the pressure he’s getting is landing… Arsenal players were given time off this week to get some rest. That’s important. I was really hoping we wouldn’t see training ground pictures this week and so far, they’ve been few and far between.

This Everton game will be quite massive at the weekend. It’ll be a more luxuriously executed Wolves plan. David Moyes will stifle, try and get in on the counter, and I suspect he’s going to try and bully our backline that has looked far weaker of late. Hincapié just isn’t Big Gabi and the rest of the league knows this.

I’ll talk more about how I think it’ll play out once I’ve seen the pressers. Until then, have a grand old day. x