At 10pm on Saturday night, Mikel Arteta said that they didn’t know if David Luiz would have surgery on his knee only for Arsenal to announce that he had a ‘small procedure’ early on Easter Sunday, so what was the point of playing dumb?
I like Mikel Arteta, let’s get that out of the way, and I like Edu a lot. He was one of my favourite players at the club and one I always felt was vastly underrated. But ever since they’ve taken over at Arsenal, I can’t say I care much for some of the paths they’ve taken.
Under Arsene Wenger the club were notoriously tight lipped about most things. Young players, like Serge Gnabry, could disappear from the face of the planet for over a year and not a word would be said about it.
Unai Emery and his lot had their faults but one thing they did was provide a lot more information to the fans, especially when it came to injuries.
That went when Arteta took over. Arsenal don’t even have a ‘team news’ page any more where they used to list the players currently injured, when they’d got injured, their last match and the latest update.
I mention that because they have irked me over this David Luiz injury and, I mean, who wants even more reason to be annoyed at something that involves David Luiz?
After the game against Liverpool on Saturday night at a little after 10pm, Mikel Arteta said about Luiz’s injury, “We don’t know [if he will have surgery]. There a few possibilities on that, being a little more conservative with the treatment or having to go for a surgery. We are talking with the doctors at the moment to make the right decision on that but we’ll see. He could be out for a few weeks at least.”
It was then announced at lunchtime on Easter Sunday, the following day, that Luiz had undergone a ‘small procedure’ on his knee. A ‘small procedure’ is surgery, however you want to make it sound like it’s not.
“David Luiz underwent a small procedure on his right knee on Sunday morning,” Arsenal’s short statement said. “The procedure has been a success and David is now back at home rehabilitating. He will be able to return to daily support and recovery with our medical team at the training centre in the coming days.”
Even if we allow for Luiz making the decision while Arteta was getting ready for the match, the club are asking us to believe that the decision was made sometime on Saturday evening and a surgeon was secured for first thing on Easter Sunday morning, which seems unlikely, although we all know that money talks.
If you don’t believe that then the next logical conclusion is that, knowing Luzi was going to have a ‘small procedure’ less than 12 hours later, Arteta decided to just fudge questions about it for no reason whatsoever.
What harm could have resulted from telling the truth at the press conference?
In the grand scheme of things, this is a nothing issue, but that is kind of the point.
There was no need to bulls**t about this, yet they did it anyway.
What does that say about the important matters?