Morning all, happy Friday to you.
Arsenal yesterday confirmed that Kai Havertz’s hamstring injury requires surgery, and that his season is well and truly over. I did mention this on the Arsecast yesterday, but one thing I didn’t see a lot of since this incident happened was focus on the player himself and how devastated he must be. It has been much more about our own reactions, and the position it leaves the team in.
It took us a while to get to know him properly. The timid, slightly broken Havertz we got from Chelsea was like the young dog you rescue from the pound who has been somewhat mistreated by his previous owner. It took a while to build a relationship, but over time we discovered a player who found his confidence again, who relished taking on the physical aspects of the game, and who very obviously cared.
I think he was grateful for Mikel Arteta’s faith him, and he understood that a big money move from Chelsea, when he was seen to have under-performed there, meant he had a lot to prove to Arsenal fans. It took a while, there were some growing pains at the start, but we got there. The penalty at Bournemouth was the beginning of it, but it grew into something really positive. Without mixing my analogies too much, Kai Havertz is an album you didn’t really dig on the first couple of listens, but in time you came to love it.
I know there’s a very vocal ‘anti-Havertz’ section among the fanbase, but I can’t connect with that at all. He’s a guy who works his arse off for the team, he has a great connection with his teammates who all speak highly of what he brings to the side, and there’s a spiky side to his character that I really like. He’s not afraid to get stuck in at times, and we’ve often missed that.
My contention with Havertz has long been that he is not a problem to Arsenal in any way, shape, or form: the problem has been that we haven’t had enough to support him or to ease the burden on him. He ran himself into the ground against Wolves a couple of weeks ago, literally. And now look. It’s a real shame, for us obviously, but for him too. If you want/demand a player who will give 100% for the shirt, for the badge, whatever cliché you want to use, he is that guy. Look at him at the end of the Everton game on the final day of last season – he was as gutted as anyone that we came so close in the Premier League but got pipped to the post by the 115 four in a row champions.
So, it’s gonna hurt him to miss what remains of this season. On a human level, it’s such a big blow for him, and while I know he’s never going to read this, amid our frustration and angst, let’s acknowledge that and wish him the very best for a speedy and uncomplicated recovery. We ask so much of our players in terms of how we play, it’s something I think the manager will need to analyse as we look to build our squad in the summer, and Havertz is – in some ways – a casualty of that. He took the hit wearing the red and white we all purport to love unconditionally, so sympathy and gratitude for his efforts ought to be the minimum response from our side as fans.
Later though, all eyes will on Mikel Arteta’s press conference ahead of our game against Leicester tomorrow. I’m not particularly interested in the stuff about January and what we didn’t do, because everyone already has an opinion about that – and there’s literally nothing we can do about it now. I’m much more curious about what sort of solutions he has to offer, in as much as he might make that public in a presser.
Tim’s column this week outlines some of it, but from this point it’s about how we respond and what we do to offset/cope with the absence of key players. At this moment in time we’re without Havertz, Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and Gabriel Jesus – that’s a lot of firepower, and it’s a worry from a goalscoring point of view. It’s also a big concern with regards the burden we place on players, the options we have to change games from the bench, and the kind of tactical variety we can deploy.
My guess is that while Arteta will probably acknowledge that on a cursory level, his message will be about dealing with the challenge, because ultimately there’s still a lot of football to play this season. Moping, bemoaning, yearning – those are not traits that help you earn those points, so it’s up to him and his coaching staff to find solutions or systems that help us do that. Quite what they might be, we’ll have to wait and discover, but perhaps he might give us a clue or two later on.
So, as well as looking ahead to the Leicester game on Patreon later, we’ll also try and flesh out some of those options and ideas in our preview podcast. If you fancy signing up, you get instant access to everything we do on Patreon for just $6 per month at patreon.com/arseblog.
Right, I’ll leave it there for now. The Arsecast is below if you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, and don’t forget we’ll have all the press conference stuff on Arseblog News too.
Until later.
