Arsenal will begin their Champions League campaign with a depleted squad after Ben White was added to the list of absentees ahead of Tuesday\u2019s opener against Athletic Club. Mikel Arteta confirmed that Martin \u00d8degaard and Bukayo Saka, who both missed Monday\u2019s training session, would not feature either.<\/p>\n
Long-term absentees Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus increase the number of unavailable first-team players to five. \u00d8degaard suffered a reoccurrence of a shoulder issue against Forest but will not have to undergo surgery. Saka also avoided the knife following damage to his hamstring last month.<\/p>\n
Speaking in his pre-match press conference on Monday, Arteta revealed: \u201cI think there are still quite a lot of things to go through [for Saka]. It\u2019s very early to understand when and which week he\u2019s going to be available. But he will certainly be pushing to be available as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was a sliver of good news as William Saliba and Christian N\u00f8rgaard are back in contention after their own fitness issues. Their potential availability will provide Arteta with options as he navigates a reduced squad for the European opener.<\/p>\n
Arsenal\u2019s summer recruitment has already been tested by the early injury problems. Viktor Gy\u00f6keres and Mart\u00edn Zubimendi were naturally expected to be swiftly thrust into the starting XI, but those plans have been altered and injuries have instead provided an early flood of minutes for Noni Madueke and Cristhian Mosquera.<\/p>\n
The timing of the absences, with several senior players missing on the eve of a major fixture, will force Arteta to adjust his selection and game plan for Tuesday\u2019s match. How quickly the sidelined players return remains uncertain, with some avoiding surgery but still requiring time to recover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ben White joins four other absentees as Arsenal approach Champions League opener short-handed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2845,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,172],"tags":[984,826,606],"class_list":["post-2846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-epl","tag-ben-white","tag-bukayo-saka","tag-christian-norgaard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}