Arsenal’s preparations for a pivotal week of their season have been jeopardised by the sight of five integral players not training on Tuesday.
The Gunners take on Sporting in the second leg of their Champions League quarter-final on Wednesday night before following that up with a Premier League top-of-the-table clash at title rivals Manchester City on Sunday afternoon.
Arsenal’s focus for now is on the Sporting clash but there was cause for concern during Tuesday’s opening training session with Riccardo Calafiori, Martin Odegaard, Declan Rice, Bukayo Saka and Jurrien Timber all not present.
Rice was the only one of the quintet involved in Saturday’s 2-1 Premier League home defeat by Bournemouth, playing the full duration of it.
His absence from their Sobha Realty Training Centre on Tuesday doesn’t mean he is definitively ruled out for Sporting on Wednesday night, but it is a worry.
Speaking about the fitness of Rice, Arteta remained coy on his availability, refusing to be drawn on it during Tuesday afternoon’s press conference.
‘I don’t want to do that [clarify Rice’s injury absence]. We have to wait and see how he is… but he wasn’t able to train.’
Asked about Rice and the five players in general, he added: ‘We have to wait until tomorrow morning to see how a few of the boys are.’
Calafiori, Odegaard, Saka and Timber have all been missing in recent weeks – with Odegaard (starting) and Calafiori (as a substitute) playing in the 2-1 FA Cup quarter-final loss at Southampton on Easter Saturday.
But there was some good news for Arsenal, with Piero Hincapie and Eberechi Eze both pictured in training.
The pair were only deemed fit enough for the bench against Bournemouth – with Eze coming on as a 54th-minute substitute.
The Gunners lead 1-0 courtesy of Kai Havertz’s second-half stoppage-time winner in Lisbon last Tuesday.
After Wednesday’s European encounter, Arsenal then have the small matter of making the trip to in-form Manchester City on Sunday afternoon.
Speaking after the defeat by Bournemouth, a deflated Arteta demanded his ‘strange’ Arsenal team show more fight after receiving a ‘big punch in the face’ by the Cherries.
He said: ‘Well, extremely disappointing. It’s a big punch in the face. That’s what I said to the boys. And now it’s about how we react to that. Because game on, you’re going to require now a lot of fight and it’s very clear.
‘There’s no grey areas. We are in, or we are out. And we need to be very, very, very strong and determined to approach it in a different way than we’ve done today, especially when the game wasn’t going our way.
‘The second half you expect a different game. We did a lot of strange things today.’
The Spaniard also admitted that the 22-year wait for a league title does weigh heavy.
He said: ‘We know what is at stake. And the fact that as a club we haven’t done it for so long (win the title) is a reason for that.
‘We talked about the difficulty. But I just want to focus on the things that we can control, dominate.
‘Let’s keep doing all the things that we’ve done for nine months, because that’s what has taken us all the way there.
‘Today, we’ve gone back. So we need to learn. We need to be very critical to ourselves and then pick ourselves up. Because on Wednesday [against Sporting], we have a big one coming up.’
