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Arsenal boss provides triple injury boost ahead of Crystal Palace

By on August 4, 2022

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Mikel Arteta has provided a triple injury boost ahead of Arsenal’s opening Premier League match against Crystal Palace.

We head to Selhurst Park on Friday night to kick-off the 2022/23 campaign with a tough game against Patrick Vieira’s Palace side, but it looks like Arteta will have a strong squad at his disposal.

Speaking at his pre-match press conference today, the Gunners boss provided a team news and injury update and he confirmed that three of our four absentees would return to training ahead of the game.

Kieran Tierney hasn’t featured since going off during the first half of Arsenal’s win at Nurnberg on July 8th while fellow full-back Takehiro Tomiyasu hasn’t featured at all during pre-season as he continues to recover from issues from last season.

Emile Smith Rowe on the other hand picked up a knock in pre-season and has been forced to sit out Arsenal’s last few pre-season games with a muscle issue.

Summer signing Fabio Vieira is yet to feature for Arsenal after arriving from Porto carrying an ankle injury.

However, it looks like the majority of the injury victims are ready to return as Arteta says three of the four will train today – although he didn’t confirm which player would still miss out.

As long as everything goes to plan, the mystery three players will be available to be in the squad against Palace tomorrow night.

Arteta told Arsenal.com:

On our team news…
Three out of four of those players [Tomiyasu, Smith Rowe, Tierney, Vieira] are going to be training this afternoon and if everything goes well, they will be available for selection and in the squad. Hopefully, we can start to recover because they’ve been missing a lot of minutes and time in pre-season and they are really important players for us.

On Tierney and Tomiyasu’s injuries…
Hopefully not, the reason they got those persistent injuries are for different reasons, probably because the squad didn’t enable them to recover, and [we] don’t play them when it was necessary and it was too tired when they weren’t fully recovered so sometimes we had to rush them. It was a combination of things with those two players, they’re so pushy and willing to contribute with the team. We know that with those two fit and performing at their best, we are much stronger as a team.

Arteta suggested at the Emirates Cup last weekend that Smith Rowe and Tierney were ‘days’ away from returning to action, while he also said Tomiyasu should resume training this week.

However, the boss said last Sunday that Vieira was at least another week away from being given the green light to train with the first team, so I suspect he’s the man who won’t be available tomorrow.

It will be a big boost to have Smith Rowe, Tierney and Tomiyasu in the squad as they are important players – although I don’t see any of them starting as Arteta is likely to stick with the eleven that thrashed Sevilla.