Arsène Wenger’s delight at securing a 15th consecutive qualification to the second round of the Champions League was tempered by the worsening of Arsenal’s injury situation, with the captain, Mikel Arteta, forced off against Borussia Dortmund with a serious calf problem.
Arsenal won 2-0 against the Bundesliga team to make sure of at least second place in Group D – they retain an outside chance of pinching top spot in the final round of fixtures in two weeks – with Yaya Sanogo opening the scoring with his first goal for the club. Sanogo damaged a hamstring towards the end and Wenger can now count 10 members of his first-team squad with injuries of varying severity.
Jack Wilshere will see a specialist on Thursday to learn whether he will require surgery on his damaged ankle ligaments – which would rule him out for three months – and Mesut Özil, Theo Walcott, Danny Welbeck, Mathieu Debuchy, Abou Diaby, Wojciech Szczesny and David Ospina are also unavailable.
“The injury situation is a problem because we have many games and we lost two players tonight,” Wenger said. “The first one is Arteta, who again has a calf problem and that looks quite serious, and we lost Sanogo as well on a hamstring problem. Wilshere sees a specialist, finally and we’ll know more on Thursday night.”
Wenger said that he was hoping for a change of luck in the second phase of the Champions League, after Arsenal had suffered nightmare draws at the last 16 in the previous four seasons. They have exited to Barcelona, Milan and twice to Bayern Munich.
“Firstly, [we should] send a different guy for the draw,” Wenger said, with a smile. “Because if you look at our record, we have got always what you did not want. Look at who is qualified around Europe, and you know that you have many teams who are top level. There are three or four teams who maybe you don’t want to play.
“From now until February, we want to improve as a team, get encouragement from tonight’s game and hope that we have nearly all our players back for the next round. We realise that it’s not easy to have that continuity and consistency [to qualify each season] and I’m very proud of that. The club deserves a lot of credit for that. But it’s not enough. We want more than that.”
