The first month after the Premier League’s winter break was billed as exam season for Arsenal, the unexpected Christmas leaders, momentum checked by half-term, facing a fixture list littered with proverbial Big Tests.
And so it is both alarming and, in hindsight, somewhat amusing to learn how close their captain, Martin Odegaard, came to missing the most important of them with what might, on a schoolboy’s sick-note, have been termed a dicky tummy.
