ARTETA MUDDIES THE SAKA WATERS

It’s Friday and it’s still not clear where we are with Saka.

My advice? Assume Saka is out. Take the pain now. Move forward emotionally. Be stronger for Sunday morning.

England put him in the squad – but Southgate said the injury was being monitored.

Arteta basically said ‘late fitness test.’

There are some guarantees here:

At the very least, he has some sort of inflammation around his hamstring. Inflammation shows up as liquid on a scan. That means wear and tear. That is a pre-injury. But you can recover from it with rest (Trossard).

The thing you don’t want to see on a scan is a tear. A tear shows up as blood on a scan. If you see blood, that’s at least 3 weeks out (Martinelli). I suspect if there was a tear, we’d know about it, and Arteta would have told the press (and England).

We’re 8 games into the season.

If Arsenal could play Saka on Sunday, they’d run the risk of at least one bad thing happening.

Here are the options.

1. The man with the pre-injury plays the game successfully, then heads out on the international break.
2. He plays the game and aggravates a short-term injury into a long-term injury

If you are gaming this out you want to mitigate the risk of a long-term problem. How do you do that? You don’t play him.

That keeps him out of danger for City and leaves no room for Gareth Southgate to break him.

2 weeks off gives him time to recover in the same way Trossard returned very quickly after a similar problem.

Saka out for City – but back for Chelsea (a), Sevilla (a), then Sheffield United (h). Yes please.

My gut says Arteta is trying to keep Pep guessing in the same way Pep is trying to fraud us into believing John Stones is out injured after sitting on the bench in the week.

This is two top managers trying to con each other.

It makes life as a fan hard – but if there’s a marginal gain somewhere, I guess it’s worth it.

Ok, short post today. We have an elite BEFORE THE WHISTLE where I talk about the basics of what I think is going on with Bukayo.

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Manchester City Before the Whistle Discussion:

The basics of Saka’s hypothesized injury
We game out the comms scenarios
Get into potential line-ups
Talk about the Daddy issues going on at Colney

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— LE GROVE (@LeGrove) October 6, 2023

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