I am beginning to question whether some of our players are really injured. It just seems too ludicrous that the squad is in this state. What I mean is, are we learning the wrong lessons? Are we sitting players with relatively minor issues who could actually be playing 60 minutes once per week, instead of rotating them effectively? Are we thinking, let's sit this guy for a couple of weeks and then play him 30 games in a row, instead of saying, let's manage the load on individual players within each week?
Another way of putting it, are we looking at the wrong temporal scale? Are we thinking in weeks or even months when we should be thinking in days? I am less and less sure that we can just trust the professionals on this. They don't seem to be effectively managing the health of our players.
People made fun of Pep for wholesale rotation in the CL, but maybe he just really doesn't want Arteta to win the league. Like I've said before, Arteta is a players' coach. He recognizes that the best want to play, and he also recognizes that players need to conceptualize the season game-by-game. But maybe he isn't really capable of getting out of the mindset himself? He has to manage a season, of which individual games are only constituent parts. He doesn't seem to understand that distinction.
I can imagine him saying to his medical team: "well, is he technically injured or not?" And when the answer comes back "no", he plays Saka for 90 minutes. If the answer is yes, he says, "OK, what's the recovery time?" And the doc faithfully answers "6 weeks", and then Saka is suddenly dead to him until he's technically not injured anymore. That way, players who want to play get to play, but they don't get to play if they are technically injured. He avoids the difficulty of having to rotate when it might not be popular with his star players through a technicality.
Anyway, just thoughts I've had recently.
