International Injury no.1: Bendtner + Djourou & Szczesny news 23 March, 2011

It was inevitable really, wasn’t it.

I had hopes that we might escape just this one international period without injury but just three days into the break we have a player being taken to hospital. Nicklas Bendtner has twisted his ankle in training for Denmark. The striker was doing shooting practice when he picked up the strain and had an ice pack on the ankle immediately. He was soon taken to hospital for scans and I’m hoping it’s nothing too serious.

The one thing we need at the moment is numbers, we cannot afford to deplete our squad any further. Whatever you think of Nicklas he will be vital to the run in, he got an assist for the equalizer at the weekend and he’s great to have in the box when chasing goal. Striker is the one position where we don’t have too many injuries but we know how quickly that can change, I’m hoping Nick has had nothing more than a nasty fall and he’s back out playing for Denmark as soon as possible; after all he could do with the match practice and a good performance for his national side could bring him back to Arsenal with even more confidence.

I expect we’ll hear news on his ankle in the next 24 hours.

Moving on to another injury and I got a bit of a shock yesterday when I saw Ray Parlour declare Djourou out for the season on his twitter after a trip to the training ground. However in the afternoon news went up on the Arsenal website that his shoulder isn’t looking too bad and he’ll be back in training in a month.

I don’t know who to believe to be honest, the optimist in me wants me to believe Arsenal.com because a return before the end of the season for Johan would be a big boost. However I know that you have to take any ‘official’ Arsenal injury news with a pinch of salt so I wouldn’t be surprised if the Romford Pele knows more than Arsenal are letting on. I don’t know, we’ll see.

Also on twitter yesterday, Szczesny was saying he’s got a scan on his finger on April 5th. That date represents exactly 4 weeks since the Barcelona game where the injury was picked up and then he says if it’s good news then it’ll be two weeks before he can go back to full training. So in an ideal scenario he could return for the Spurs game which is 6 weeks and 1 day since the injury but I wouldn’t get your hopes up so soon, lets wait a couple of weeks and see how the scan goes.

He has still been training though. His finger is only in a splint so it’s not stopping him from getting down to London Colney and working on his distribution and a bit of gym work. Good to see he’s still busy. His kicking is probably the weakest point of his game so I’m glad to see he’s using this time to work on it.

By the way I’ve compiled a list of all the Arsenal players on twitter and you can view that here. It’s pretty handy for getting early injury news like that but also having the chance to win great competitions and learning that Jack Wilshere loves a bit of Gossip Girl.

In other news Alisher Usmanov has upped his stake in Arsenal but only by a small margin and I have to admit I’m a lot less worried about Jabba the Hutt taking over the club than I was about three years ago.

We’ve got 14 players away on international duty, that’s one down and 13 to go. Keep them fingers crossed. Unless you’re Wojciech Szczesny of course and leave them fingers alone.

It’s such a nice day in Bournemouth today so I think I’m gonna head down to the beach. I’m out of here, thanks for reading.