In the end, it took barely two weeks for Arsenal’s great gamble to backfire. This is a club that rolled the dice in January, choosing to rely on the fitness of Kai Havertz rather than recruit another attacking player to support him, and they are now already paying the price for that decision.
The news of Havertz’s serious injury is nothing short of disastrous for Arsenal’s campaign. The German was the only available centre-forward in Mikel Arteta’s squad and, by some distance, their top scorer this season. Arsenal hoped Havertz’s body would hold out until May but, as it turns out, it could only last a few more days.
On February 3, following the closure of the transfer window, this author wrote that Arsenal’s attacking options were “perilously thin”. Since then, they have lost not only Havertz to a serious injury, but Gabriel Martinelli too (also a hamstring problem). If their frontline was thin before, it is almost translucent now.
It will only add to Arsenal’s anguish that Havertz’s injury took place on the club’s training camp in Dubai. This was supposed to be a restorative trip, a time for Arsenal to reset and regroup. Instead, they have come back from the Middle East weaker than when they left.
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Footage showed Havertz being shepherded by Arsenal staff as he walked gingerly away from training in Dubai on Tuesday.
The assumption that Havertz would remain fit was, in many ways, a fair one. Last season he started 22 of the final 23 games of the campaign, and Arteta recently described him as a genetic “powerhouse”. Internally, Havertz has long been regarded as one of Arsenal’s most robust and durable players.
Equally, though, Arsenal can hardly say that no one could possibly have predicted an injury to the 25-year-old. As the leader of Arsenal’s attack, Havertz works relentlessly on and off the ball, covering huge amounts of ground at high speeds. At the end of Arsenal’s recent victory at Wolves, in which they played for more than half the game with 10 men, he collapsed to the turf in exhaustion.
What happens now? For the next month or so, Arteta has Leandro Trossard, Raheem Sterling and Ethan Nwaneri as his only three attacking players. Three forwards for three positions in Arsenal’s usual 4-3-3 formation. Trossard is likely to play as the central striker, with Sterling to the left and Nwaneri to the right.
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Beyond that, Arsenal are into the unknown. Their supporters might not think this situation can get any worse but another injury, to one of those three forwards, would leave them in a state of pure desperation. Kieran Tierney as a winger? Mikel Merino as a striker? Such ideas would sound ludicrous in normal circumstances but now cannot be ruled out.
When Arsenal play Chelsea on March 16, they will not even have Sterling. He is on loan from Stamford Bridge, which makes him ineligible for that Premier League game.
The only reason for any optimism at all is that Martinelli and Bukayo Saka will be back before the end of this campaign. A March return is possible for both, although Saka may have to wait until April. Gabriel Jesus, by contrast, will not be on the pitch again until next season.
Among the Arsenal supporters, there was already a considerable amount of dissatisfaction with the club’s inability to recruit a forward in the winter window. Now, that dissatisfaction is likely to turn to outright anger.
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Arsenal’s reasoning for not buying a forward was that they could not sign a player they truly wanted in January. They feared that moving for the wrong striker, for the sake of simply getting a body into the building, would prevent them from buying one of their top targets in the summer.
Those decisions were made at a time when Martinelli and Havertz were fit. Now, there will surely be some regret that Arsenal did not find a body somewhere in the world of football. Even an average striker is better than no striker at all.
Nothing is impossible in football but it is hard to see how Arsenal can now challenge for the Premier League and Champions League with such limited firepower. In the Premier League, against Liverpool’s remarkable collection of forwards, Arsenal are effectively taking a knife to a gun fight. In contrast to Arsenal’s options, Liverpool have Mohamed Salah, Luis Diaz, Diogo Jota, Cody Gakpo, Darwin Nunez and Federico Chiesa.
Arteta has overcome numerous challenges and setbacks in his time as Arsenal manager. It now feels certain that these next few weeks could be among the most testing of his coaching career. The Spaniard must find a way, with such limited resources, of preventing Arsenal’s season from unravelling in the absence of their best attackers. Their campaign is hanging by a thread.
Merino at No 9? Arteta’s four options after Havertz bombshell
Repurpose a senior player
Desperate times call for desperate measures and, if Havertz’s injury is serious, Arteta might feel compelled to re-train one of his existing first-team players as a forward.
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Could Kieran Tierney or Oleksandr Zinchenko, for example, operate as wingers in Arsenal’s system? Tierney played on the wing in his academy days at Celtic but that was a long time ago, and it would certainly be an unfamiliar set of demands for the Scotland international. On the other hand, he is one of the best crossers of the ball in Arsenal’s squad.
Zinchenko has only ever operated as a left-back since joining Arsenal from Manchester City, but did play in more advanced midfield roles earlier in his career. For Ukraine, he often plays in midfield.
Elsewhere in the squad, Mikel Merino has impressed with his work in the penalty box and would be capable of attacking crosses with his aerial prowess. Some of his best work for Arsenal has been in the penalty area and, in terms of long balls and crosses, he is probably the most obvious target man at Arteta’s disposal.
Whether the Spaniard is capable of running in behind opposition defences and drifting into wide areas is, however, another question entirely. It is unlikely he would start in such a position but it feels faintly possible that the midfielder could move there late in matches, if Arsenal are chasing a goal.
Trossard down the middle
The most likely solution for Arsenal would be to deploy Leandro Trossard as a central striker. The Belgian appears to be the leading candidate for the role, having played there against Girona last month when Havertz was on the bench.
It is not Trossard’s natural position but the demands of the role would not be entirely unfamiliar to him. Last season he started six games in the striker position, with largely positive results. He was in that role for Arsenal’s commanding victories at West Ham United and Burnley a year ago.
To deploy the 30-year-old in the central position would probably require a change in structure, though. When he has played there before, Trossard has largely operated as a “false nine”, dropping into deeper and wider areas to help Arsenal build their play. Last season, this allowed Havertz to dart forward from midfield areas.
This time around, Arsenal might need players such as Declan Rice and Merino to be more willing to run in behind and stretch the opposition defence. Neither player is accustomed to doing so.
Another wide player who could come inside, into a more central position, is Raheem Sterling, who has previously played as a striker at various points of his club career.
Accelerate Nwaneri masterplan
Arteta said in December that Ethan Nwaneri, the teenage sensation in Arsenal’s squad, could develop into a centre-forward over time. “Ethan can play as a right attacking midfielder, left attacking midfielder, as a right winger and there is another position he can develop into in a few years time: nine,” said the Arsenal manager.
“[When] he’s got the goal in front of him, he just looks at the goal. He has a tremendous ability to put the ball in the back of the net.”
Clearly, it was not Arteta’s plan to push Nwaneri into this position so soon. But there must be a temptation to do so, given the 17-year-old’s technical ability and obvious finishing prowess.
Nwaneri has demonstrated his ability in front of goal by already scoring seven times this season, in only 700 minutes of first-team action. An indication of his quality is that only Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney (nine each) have scored more goals for a Premier League side while aged 17 or younger.
There can be no doubts about Nwaneri’s finishing ability, then. But playing as a striker for Arsenal requires far more than an eye for goal. Can he hold the ball under pressure? Can he attack crosses? Can he make the runs in behind that create space for others? Those in favour of using Nwaneri as a striker would say there is only one way to find out.
Look to academy
Under Arteta, Arsenal have previously had success in using the academy in times of need. It was at the low point of Arteta’s tenure, in the winter of the 2020/21 season, that he threw Emile Smith Rowe into the fold and transformed Arsenal’s campaign.
Are there any young players who could be called upon this year? Perhaps the most likely candidate is Nathan Butler-Oyedeji, a 22-year-old striker who has regularly been on the bench in recent weeks. He made a brief appearance as a substitute during Arsenal’s 3-0 win over Dinamo Zagreb last month.
It would be inaccurate, though, to suggest that Butler-Oyedeji has long been regarded as a potential first-team star. At 22, he is five years older than Nwaneri. Butler-Oyedeji has had two loan spells away from the club, at Accrington Stanley and Cheltenham Town, but failed to score in a combined 24 appearances for those two clubs.
Young winger Ismeal Kabia could come into the fold as a back-up option on the flanks. The 19-year-old has been around the first-team squad on a few occasions this season and made his senior debut in September’s League Cup victory over Bolton Wanderers.
Another winger who has previously sampled first-team action is 20-year-old Charles Sagoe Jr, who spent the first half of this season on loan at Shrewsbury Town. That loan deal was cut short after he made only five league starts.
It is tempting to wonder whether highly rated striker Chido Obi-Martin would have been given a first-team opportunity at Arsenal, if he had not moved to Manchester United in October. He had a remarkable goal-scoring record in the academy and Arsenal had hoped to keep him at the club.
