How bad is Bukayo Saka’s injury really?

Mikel Arteta has not said Bukayo Saka’s season is in danger, but his latest comments do leave more room for concern than the club would probably like at this stage of the campaign.

Bukayo Saka has missed the last four Arsenal matches and is out ‘for sure’ against Manchester City this weekend, but did Mikel Arteta’s pre-match press conference comments hint at a concern that the problem is more serious than hoped?

Arsenal have a number of injury problems ahead of their crucial game at the Etihad this weekend.

Jurrien Timber is unlikely to be involved, Mikel Merino definitely won’t be, and there are serious doubts, too, over Martin Odegaard, Riccardo Calafiori, and Noni Madueke, that could prompt a start for 16-year-old Max Dowman. A full Arsenal injury round-up ahead of the game can be found here.

Leaving Merino aside, whose season we already believe to be over, only Saka was definitively ruled out by Arteta ahead of the game. “Bukayo [Saka] is out, that’s for sure,” he said. “The rest, let’s see.”

But it was his comments later in the presser that caught my attention.

Asked about the importance of protecting players in light of Hugo Ekitike’s Achilles exploding in their Champions League match against PSG, Arteta said, “I don’t know about Hugo’s situation beforehand, but I take the opportunity to hopefully say he recovers very soon, because I think he’s a tremendous player, and with B [Saka], we are trying to protect the player first of all and then to perform as well as he possibly can.

“The idea is that we can possibly deliver that, so that’s a challenge.”

Ekitike is set to be out for nine months, meaning he will obviously miss the rest of the season for Liverpool and the World Cup for France as he awaits surgery on his ruptured Achilles.

Saka is also suffering with an Achilles problem, the type of injury only being confirmed this week ahead of the game against Sporting in the Champions League, and everyone clearly wants to avoid what happened to Ekitike.

Giving that update before Sporting, Arteta said, “It was something that he was carrying for a while. It was an Achilles issue.”

Then asked if Saka had a ‘setback’, Arteta replied, “It is his progression, but hopefully it’s going to be a matter of days and not weeks. But he has to see when he’s loading more, how he responds to that kind of progression.”

‘Hopefully’.

When paired with his most recent comments that they want to both protect Saka and ensure he can play at his best but “The idea is that we can possibly deliver that, so that’s a challenge.”

‘Possibly’. ‘A challenge’.

The club’s stated position is that the problem is hopefully measured in days rather than weeks. Yet the wording is cautious throughout, and that is what invites questions.

“Hopefully” is not certainty. Nor is “possibly”. When Arteta says Arsenal are trying both to protect the player and make sure he can perform at his best, before adding that delivering both is “a challenge”, it does at least suggest the situation is not entirely straightforward.

That does not mean Saka’s season is over. There is nothing in Arteta’s comments that says that directly, and it would be a stretch to claim otherwise.

But nor do they sound like the language of a simple problem with a return date in the near future.

Hopefully, I’m wrong.

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