Arsenal face a testing Saturday fixture at the Emirates as Manchester City and Aston Villa press in the title race. Mikel Arteta will want a commanding display, but the manager is likely to be without two of his most influential attackers.<\/p>\n
Bukayo Saka and Martin \u00d8degaard have both missed recent matches and appear unlikely to be available for the visit of Sunderland. The creativity and control they supply will be difficult to replace against a well-organised opponent.<\/p>\n
Saka injured his hip in the warm-up to the 4\u20130 win against Leeds United last weekend and subsequently sat out the midweek victory over Chelsea in the second leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final. \u00d8degaard came off the bench last Saturday in the win at Elland Road but was a surprise omission on Tuesday against Chelsea. The Arsenal captain was struggling with a small muscle issue and was unable to make the semi-final.<\/p>\n
Arteta offered an update on both players in his pre-match press conference and sounded cautiously optimistic while withholding firm timetables. \u201cHis hip is getting much better. Hopefully very soon he will be with us; very soon,\u201d he said of Saka. Of the captain he added: \u201cMartin again is getting better, it will be a matter of days we believe,\u201d.<\/p>\n
Neither player has returned to full training at the time of the briefing, which makes their involvement against the Black Cats unlikely. Arsenal next play on Thursday in a rare midweek league round and will hope to have one or both available for the trip to Brentford.<\/p>\n
Arteta also addressed Jurri\u00ebn Timber\u2019s status. Timber started against Chelsea midweek but was then absent from a training session on Thursday, prompting some concern. Arteta nevertheless insisted the Dutchman is ready to face Sunderland and should be available for selection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arteta: Saka and \u00d8degaard are improving but have not returned to training ahead of Sunderland. soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6608,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,969,689],"tags":[1305,826,1066],"class_list":["post-6609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-premier-league","category-sunderland","tag-bench-selection","tag-bukayo-saka","tag-carabao-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609","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=6609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}