Morning all.
Let’s start with some interesting stuff from Alexis Sanchez who has spoken about how injuries have affected his season. On a very surface level, it’s obvious. He pulled a hamstring against Norwich, and missed the best part of 2 months – 10 games in total. We can all reckon with that without any difficulty.
He’d been struggling for form before that, and has worked his way back to something closer to his best in recent weeks, but he says fear of getting injured again was inhibiting him after his return. He said:
Before my injury I was 100 per cent fit. I was feeling well. After the injury I wanted to get back but it was hard. I had a setback and when I played a match, I was scared I would get injured again because the thing I like most in the world is playing football and when I can’t play, I feel sad.
I suppose we look at things from a purely physical point of view. Is that hamstring back it’s prime hamminess? Are those calves properly calfy? Is that groin as supple and moist as it should be? We rarely think about how the injury might affect the player mentally.
To be fair, it’s something Arsene Wenger has spoken about previously. When a player is out for a while with a problem, they have to come through it both physically and psychologically before they can get back to their best. If you’re concerned that sprinting might aggravate a muscle strain, chances are you’re not going to go flat out, and the difference at this level is going to be obvious. It means the defender getting to the ball before you, or you not being able to get beyond him when previously you could.
If you’ve been hurt in a challenge, then are you going to go 100% into a similar one? You have to at some point, otherwise you’ll never be the same player, but it must weigh heavily for a while. Imagine what someone like Aaron Ramsey must have been thinking the first time he went into a 50-50 when he’d returned from 9 months out after his leg was snapped in two by that Ryan Shawcross tackle.
In terms of Alexis, it’s interesting to note he said he was 100% fit before his injury. We’d heard he’d been carrying a tight hamstring and when it went against Norwich it was portrayed as inevitable. Again, so much of this comes down to what the player communicates to the medical team. If you’re ‘sad’ when you can’t play, there must be a part of you that will play regardless of whether it’s the best thing for you or not.
Aside from that though, I don’t see how he could possibly have been 100% fit at all this season. He didn’t get anything close to sufficient rest in the summer, and if we talk about Arsene Wenger gambling last summer on things that didn’t come off, this was another one. Rather than use the transfer market, he stuck with certain players who haven’t been able to contribute enough, and he also figured that Alexis was the kind of player who could play his way through despite being very obviously affected by fatigue.
You need only look at his goalscoring this season to see how his form in front of goal has been sporadic. 8 games without scoring at the start of the season, then he scored in 4 consecutive games, before having another 8 game run without a goal. He scored against Zagreb, got injured, missed all those games in December and January, then scored on January 31st in the FA Cup.
He’s got just 2 goals in the last 14 games, although he has popped up with a number of assists in recent weeks as he approaches some reasonable form again, but to me it’s evidence of a player who has never been properly fit this season, and for that we have to take the responsibility. We know there are summer tournaments, we know that players absolutely need a rest when the domestic and European schedules are so hectic, and we didn’t give that to him.
It’s our job to build a squad that cope, and we didn’t. We threw him on against West Ham on the opening day when he shouldn’t have been anywhere near the squad, and perhaps that set the tone for some of his struggles this season too.
And lest anyone think this is a man who has let the team down, rather than the other way around, he went on to say:
I think I have adapted well to the club but I am never satisfied with what I do. I want to win the Premier League, the Champions League. I always want to win everything. Football is my passion, my life and I always want to win. If I lose, I always go home sad, I can’t sleep and that upsets me. When I win, my team-mates are happy and enjoy their families the next day. Football is my life.
I realise it’s impossible to quantify attitude. You can’t take a blood sample and reveal that a player’s WANT IT count is through the roof. But with Alexis he says it out loud, and you see it in the way that he plays. It’s been difficult to watch him at times this season as the feet and legs haven’t been able to match the desire he’s got in his head, but hopefully he’ll be able to get back to his best before this season is out.
Right, that’s about that for this morning. It looks like the manager’s pre-West Ham press conference is taking place this morning, so we’ll have all the bits and pieces from that over on Arseblog News.
I’m back tomorrow with the usual guff and an Arsecast for you. Until then.
