Ahead of our season opener against Crystal Palace on Friday night, Mikel Arteta issued an update on the state of his squad in his pre-match press conference.
The boss provided the latest on four of his players; Kieran Tierney, Takehiro Tomiyasu, Emile Smith Rowe and new signing Fabio Vieira.
Here’s what he said:
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.
On the eve of the new Premier League season, Mikel Arteta has revealed that he is sharing the same excitement as the majority of football fans across the country, no matter who they support.
All eyes will be on Selhurst Park today when we get the honour of kicking off the new campaign against the Eagles, and the boss admitted he’s just as buzzing as our supporters to get back to the thrust of Premier League action.
Speaking in his first official press conference of the season, he said: “It’s great that people are excited. But there is a big excitement across the Premier League because a lot of clubs have done a lot of business, getting stronger and stronger. The competition is really big; we focus on what we can do, what we want to do and we want to be at the top of the table.
“You try every day to be more excited and love your players more and feel more privileged of where you are. The more things you do that are related to the way you feel, and you share that feeling with the club like we do, then it becomes a common thing.
“At the end it’s not about me, it’s about how we all feel about what we are doing. We all feel an integral part of it, especially our supporters, when we do that. I always say it becomes very, very powerful.”
A promising summer has yielded five new recruits and six goal-filled wins against a mixture of opposition in various locations, and while Arteta is satisfied with the feel-good factor around the club, he is under no illusions that Patrick Vieira’s Palace will pose a very different prospect on Friday night.
Reflecting on the past couple of months, he said: “I think we are all enthusiastic. We had the pre-season that we wanted, it was well-organised, we had good results, good performances and good preparation, but now the ball starts to roll today evening in a completely different context against a Premier League team and we know what to expect there.
“But it’s true, we are with a level of energy and ambition to have a successful season and we have to show that on the pitch today night.”
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