Mikel Arteta left Arsenal supporters with few concrete answers after victory over Crystal Palace as a quartet of players exited the match with fitness doubts. William Saliba did not return for the second half after feeling discomfort at the interval, while Declan Rice and Riccardo Calafiori were also forced off. Even substitute Gabriel Martinelli was affected by niggles.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn Willy [Saliba], there are two things related to his substitution,\u201d Arteta said, adding only that the centre back \u201chad to be out after the first half.\u201d Saliba had twisted his ankle at the end of August but missed only one match, the 3\u20130 win over Nottingham Forest, with Cristhian Mosquera filling his place. The 21-year-old summer recruit was described as assured against Palace and might have been called upon against Brighton & Hove Albion in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday even if Saliba had been available.<\/p>\n
Rice limped off inside the final 10 minutes, a rare sight for a player who earned the nickname \u2018The Horse\u2019 for \u201cmy ability to go again, my sustainability and availability to the team,\u201d by his own reasoning. Arteta said: \u201cDeclan was struggling with a knock that he took from the first half,\u201d but did not give further detail on the nature or severity of the problem.<\/p>\n
Calafiori left the pitch alongside Rice and was included in the generalised assessment. \u201cLet\u2019s see how they recover,\u201d the manager said. When pressed for specifics, Arteta added: \u201cNo, because I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s not because I don\u2019t want to tell you, I don\u2019t really know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arteta has previously been tactical about communicating injury information, once instructing injured players to stroll out of the team bus in their pregame kit to maintain the impression of availability. He also cast doubt over Gabriel\u2019s involvement this weekend only to start the Brazilian and keep him on for the full 90 minutes.<\/p>\n
Martinelli had replaced Bukayo Saka midway through the second half. Arteta explained Saka\u2019s removal by revealing: \u201cBukayo\u2019s been ill and hasn\u2019t really trained. We didn\u2019t know whether he was going to be fit, so he made a big effort to be available today.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe doctor guided us to give us the best possible opportunity to be in the best condition. He managed to play a few minutes but the longer the game went on, he was getting too fatigued and risked injury. We didn\u2019t want to take that risk.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arteta cautious on Arsenal fitness after Crystal Palace win; injuries to Saliba, Rice, Martinelli…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4064,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,172],"tags":[947,826,253],"class_list":["post-4065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-epl","tag-ankle-injury","tag-bukayo-saka","tag-declan-rice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4065","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=4065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}