Match report – Player ratings – By the numbers – Video

Arsenal and November, what joy. They go together like toothpaste and orange juice. Yesterday saw further points dropped, more injuries sustained and genuine worries emerge about how we’re going to cope if they turn out to be in any way serious.

It’s one thing bemoaning the lack of Jack Wilshere, Danny Welbeck, and Tomas Rosicky as players who can provide us options and depth, but when you lose Laurent Koscielny, Alexis Sanchez and possibly Santi Cazorla, then you’re talking about vital components of this team. And if they’re struggling to perform, the potential replacements are really going to have their work cut out for them.

The game began badly with Koscielny pulling up early on with a hip injury. He looked in real pain, the magic spray did nothing, and he had to be replaced by Gabriel. We were playing ok, tidy on the ball, dominating possession but creating very little. The keeper was barely tested until his poor kick out was mis-controlled by one of his midfielders. That allowed Alexis to nip in, nick the ball and play a lovely pass to Mesut Ozil.

With the keeper coming out to narrow the angle, he chipped a shot over him and into the bottom corner to put us ahead. A beautiful finish. From there you hoped that we might go on and really take the game to them, but we never could quite build that momentum. Whether it was the conditions, some general fatigue, or something else I don’t know, but after what happened at West Brom you always worried.

Just before Norwich equalised there was an incident with Ryan Bennett and Alexis, the Norwich man pushing the Chilean in the back while his feet were off the ground. He ended up falling down a cameraman’s pit and was lucky not to have seriously injured himself. Like the push on Mathieu Debuchy by Stoke’s Marko Arnautovic last season, the consequences could have been a lot worse. It’s one of those offences that rarely gets punished the way it should – given how it could damage a player who is essentially helpless, it should be a yellow card at the very least, if not red for reckless endangerment.

Not that it had any bearing on the goal we conceded. Aaron Ramsey was bypassed a little too easily in midfield, but the defending from Gabriel was very poor, leaving Lewis Grabban and his appalling beard with the simple task of slotting past Cech to make it 1-1. If Wes Hoolahan had managed to keep his shot down just before the break, we might well have repeated the West Brom trick and gone in behind.

There was an interesting stat from Orbinho about this:

50% of all the goals Arsenal have conceded this season shipped in the 15 minutes before half time

— Orbinho (@Orbinho) November 29, 2015

That suggests there are issues of concentration and application, it’s clearly a bit of a problem right now and it’s a worrying one. Still, there was 45 minutes for us to find another goal and a way to win the game. A whole half of football with Ozil, Giroud, Ramsey, Cazorla et al, and this was our second half from an attacking point of view:

I know the manager said afterwards that Cazorla ‘played on one leg’ for the second half, having picked up a knee problem just after the break, but it’s still pretty turgid stuff overall. 7amkickoff’s By the numbers piece on Arseblog News looks at this a little more, but it was uninspiring football from a team that supposedly has title pretensions. Even without all the injured players, there ought to have been more from the ones we had on the pitch.

Hopes of finding a winner were made more difficult by the loss of Alexis to a hamstring strain on the hour mark. It felt inevitable, of course, and while his replacement Joel Campbell tried hard, there’s a gulf in quality there that is obvious to everyone. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain came on for Aaron Ramsey and like the Welshman looked like a player who is just back from injury and thus rusty.

Up front Giroud had one of those frustrating games where he seemingly used all his energy on complaining, sometimes legitimately, about fouls and pushes and pulls on his jersey, rather than directing that into his actual performance. He didn’t get much in the way of service, in fairness, our crossing from both sides was poor, but these are the performances that colour opinion of him so greatly.

Ultimately we had Petr Cech to thank for saving us a point at all. When a Norwich cross deflected off Gabriel it was heading for the bottom corner until the keeper made an absolutely sensational save to turn it around the post. Even then we rode our luck a little when Howson fired over the bar from the resulting corner – from the position he was in, he really should have scored.

Arsenal huffed and puffed, but it never felt like we were going to score. Two more points dropped, meaning we’ve taken just 2 from the last 9, and while we’re still just 2 off the top and that’s obviously a positive thing, the weeks ahead have become increasingly challenging because of the injuries we’ve picked up yesterday.

We have to wait and see about Koscielny and Cazorla, but even the lowest grade hamstring strain usually requires 2-3 weeks out and that means we’ll probably be without Alexis until the Man City game at least. If you’re looking for the silver-lining, it at least means he’ll have to rest for that period of time.

Afterwards, there was a lot of criticism of the decision to play him in this game, but the manager defended that, saying:

I would rested him today but before the game he declared he was perfectly all right. The players are there to play football and not to be rested when the press decides they need to be rested. Despite all our test he looked alright.

You have plenty of players across Europe who play every single game.

My feeling on this whole thing is a bit mixed. Obviously I’m unhappy that Alexis is injured, at the same time I understand his selection. If you are similarly dismayed by the fact he picked up a hamstring strain it’s because you know how important he is to the team. On a day like yesterday he’s somebody who could produce something out of nothing because of his quality.

Bearing that in mind, isn’t the decision to play him one most of us would have made? If the medical tests didn’t show any problem – even if the manager spoke about a hamstring issue during the week – and the player himself asserts that he’s fine, I think picking him is something most of us would have done.

Ultimately players are not machines. You can’t plug them in and see ‘Right hamstring: 50% power’. If they say they’re fine then you have to trust that they’re telling you the truth. If that is backed up by the medical team and the fitness tests, then ask yourself would you have chosen to start without Alexis for a game we had to win? If you have a player of similar quality you could probably try and do without out from the start, but as well as Joel Campbell has played in patches, I don’t think he’s that player.

The bigger issue is the fact that we’re paying the price for having a squad replete with injury prone players. The effects of that are obvious. Certain players are so often out that others are played to the point where fatigue and heavy legs affect performances, and it increases their susceptibility to injury because they play so much.

When you’re almost always trying to manage a squad that is short of depth and options – and this season in particular has been painfully bad in that regard – you’re pissing into the wind. The performance against Norwich, and West Brom last week, was that of a tired team, and that can happen. It’s the complete inability to change things around effectively that’s the major issue. The number of players we have in the squad isn’t the issue, it’s the number of fit ones.

If you have a fresh Welbeck, Walcott, Wilshere and Rosicky to put in that team, or an Oxlade-Chamberlain or Ramsey that’s not just coming back from injury, then you can at least have some confidence you can change the dynamic of a game if you need to. When those players, perhaps Welbeck excepted, are ones who are consistently and regularly sidelined, then you have to assess their overall impact on the squad, positive and negative, and act accordingly.

We simply have too many injury prone players. Until the balance shifts in the other direction, we’ll suffer for it, and that probably requires a ruthlessness in terms of squad building that Arsene Wenger doesn’t have. What it means for now is that an already short squad has become even more so, and the potential for further absences is obvious.

We’ve got a couple of Premier League games against opposition who are already scrapping for survival, sandwiched between them a crucial Champions League game for which we’ll be without any number of attacking options. This group of players is really going to have to dig deep to climb out of this November hole.

It’s overstating things to say the season is on a knife-edge, we are only 2 points off the top as it stands. However, much of that is down to the mediocrity of this Premier League season in general, the paucity of other teams around us has kept us in it, and while that’s obviously very welcome, unless we can find a way to start firing again, that gap is bound to increase.

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James and I will be here later with an Arsecast Extra. As ever if you have questions or topics for discussion, please send to @gunnerblog and @arseblog on Twitter with the hashtag #arsecastextra.

Until then.