But the likes of Jack Wilshere, Danny Welbeck, Tomas Rosicky and Mikel Arteta all in the treatment room alongside Coquelin, with a lack of central midfielders the main issue Wenger is likely to address if he buys in the transfer window.
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The Gunners recorded a comfortable 3-0 victory over Dinamo Zagreb at the Emirates Stadium on Tuesday night in a game they had to win to remain in contention to get out of Group F.
Arsenal received a Champions League lifeline courtesy of Alexis Sanchez’s double and assistance from Bayern Munich on Tuesday. It gives us a chance but how big the chance is I don’t know. Then of course I couldn’t take Sanchez off. We now have five days to recover anyway.
“First of all we need to win”.
“If you don’t play every week for an athlete, it’s not easy because the more games you have in your legs the better you become”.
It’s a relief for Wenger, who had to confirm that Francis Coquelin will be out for at least two months a knee injury following the game against Westbrom, as reported by the website. “Everyone was on the ball from the start, we attacked well and that is something we need to continue if we want to compete for anything this season”.
The Chile forward played 90 minutes against Dinamo and scored his first goals since mid-October and sustained a minor hamstring problem.
Arsenal keeper Petr Cech said Wednesday he expected a “play-off” Champions League game against Olympiacos on December 9 as the two teams vie for a spot in the knock-out phase. “We played at a good pace, produced a game of quality that we wanted”.
“For us, it was a bad result”, Wenger admitted at his pre-match press conference on Thursday morning.
But Arsenal face the much tougher task, as Chelsea are in a strong position following Matchday 5 of the Champions League. Let’s make right what we did not do right until now.
Flamini does have the pedigree of previously playing for France and AC Milan, as well as being a regular in the 2007-8 Arsenal team that came the closest since the 2003-4 “Invincibles” to winning the Premier League title.
For Olympiacos, apart from tonight, Oxalde-Chamberlain will certainly be back while Theo Walcott has a chance.
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“For us a bargain is to buy players of top quality, only top quality strengthens our squad”.
