Mikel Arteta spoke to the media about Rob Holding after the Manchester City clash, with the defender suffering a hamstring problem.

Rob Holding made the starting lineup to face Manchester City on Saturday, rather surprisingly, considering he missed out on the last game against Sheffield United. Clearly, he’s higher in Mikel Arteta’s estimations than I realised.

Unfortunately, he didn’t even make it to the first minute of the match, suffering a tight hamstring in the warmup. Arteta answered questions about it after the game, but he didn’t have a huge amount of information.

“We don’t know [how bad it is],” he said. “But it was bad enough to make the decision to get Rob out of the game and to get David in.”

For yesterday’s match, Arsenal had David Luiz and Gabriel Magalhaes to take Holding’s place. But if the Englishman is out for any prolonged period of time, Arteta will hope his other defenders return to fitness soon.

Calum Chambers and Shkodran Mustafi are back in training, with Pablo Mari to follow soon. But none of them have played a match in months, so they need time to get back up to speed.

Arsenal have some Europa League games coming up, so that might be a good chance to ease them in. Even if it’s only from the bench. Luiz and Gabriel can’t play every single game for 90 minutes with how busy the schedule is going to get.

Hopefully, the hamstring concern was nothing serious, though. If Holding is still available, Arsenal can take their time on the others.