Mikel Arteta admitted his fears that Arsenal players picked up injuries in the Europa League win at Bodo/Glimt on an artifical pitch.
The Norwegians play on the surface because of the extreme weather conditions inside the Arctic Circle but Arteta suggested that the full extent of his squad’s reaction to it will become clear in the next 48 hours.
“You are [worried about injuries], but it’s the squad we have,” he told reporters.
“We had 16 players available. So I have to play 11, and I don’t want those 11 to play 90 minutes here, because I know probably what is going to happen in the next day or two.
“If they get injured here we should be talking about how we should not be risking a player, or risk [another] player. At the end, they have to play.”
Gunners boss Arteta rotated his line-up for the trip to Bodo but did give Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka and William Saliba starts in the 1-0 win.
It was Saka who scored the first-half winner as Arsenal maintained their 100 per cent record in the Europa League group stage.
Arteta said: “Really tough, I said before we played at the Emirates, this is a really good team that is going to cause you problems, especially the moment you start to lose certain duels and allowed, especially the left-back to progress the play so easily and go through your press too easily.”
“And once we haven’t controlled that, we were in big trouble, and that was probably the difference between the first and the second half. Obviously, the conditions, the pitch, is another element that you could see sometimes that it was too fast for us but there is no excuse.”
