He’s the red beast of London
We all love him
We hate to see him hurt or suffer
But here we are. He played 90 minutes against Uruguay in their world cup qualifier and they lost…pretty badly. A 3-0 defeat is always hard to take but it’s over and done with and now maybe we could turn to the homefront. When does he return? And what state will he be in when he returns?
It has been quite evident even to blind men everywhere that Alexis has been knackered and who can blame him? I have seen somewhere that the lad hasn’t had a rest in almost 5 years– That’s a long time, like really long. It’s been particularly bad in the last 2 years as he played for Barcelona, went to a World cup, joined Arsenal, played almost every game for Arsenal, went for a copa America so he didn’t even have a pre-season and BAM! He’s playing for Arsenal again.
Seeing as he played in our first game albeit as a substitute, it means he’s basically played in every game for us (minus the carling cup of course). That’s serious and when you read comments by his manager that he might be carrying a calf injury…that worries me.
Jorge Sampoli said:
“Alexis had pain in his calf,” he said, “and we will wait for him until the last minute to see if he is ready to play”
So he played despite this, this is good and bad. Good in the sense that it probably wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t be risked and bad in the sense that by playing he might have aggravated it. I’m tempted to go all ‘He’s an Arsenal player we pay his wages and his country shouldn’t be so insensitive’ but that would be wrong as it was a crucial qualifier and it’s his country which he loves.
We can’t just stand up and say he shouldn’t play for his home nation and it’s quite likely he would be unhappy if he doesn’t play. So it’s a lose-lose in a sense. So what to do?
We play West Brom at the weekend then we play Zagreb, then Norwich and I think Aston Villa. Not saying any of these games are easy, but for the sake of the greater good it might be prudent to rest him for one or two of these games. We have Ramsey and Oxlade Chamberlain coming back (hopefully) and there’s still Joel Campbell. It might not be an ideal situation but we need to give him a breather. A two week break wouldn’t be amiss in my opinion. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to afford him being gone for that long but at least we should be able to maybe manage two games without him so he can be back fresh and ready to fire for us.
Beyond that there’s precious little going on. Football still mourns the attacks in France and the world should also take a moment to remember that these same senseless killings are rampant in Burma, Syria, Nigeria, Lebanon and so on. I guess we should just pray for the world as this is all quite sad.
On that sombre note, I leave it here for today.
Till later
