Before Arsenal football club visited the Etihad Stadium to play against Manchester City, three of their star players self isolated because one of them tested positive for coronavirus. They were only allowed to join the rest of the squad on the last day of preparation for the match.
Recall that before the season which has been halted since March 13 restarted, the Premier League had published a social distancing guideline which stipulates that whenever a player of a team test positive for the virus, the player and any other person he has very close contact with would have to self-isolate until he tests negative twice.
Hence, when the player who has not been named tested positive for the virus, a contact tracing was conducted and it was discovered that he has been in very closed contact with other two superstars at the club who were not also named.
However, the said player tested positive for the virus out of error as an in-house series of testing confirmed that no one within the club had the virus including the player the Premier League said had contracted it.
When Arsenal was able to certify that they didn’t have the virus after self-isolating for some days, the Premier League allowed them to resume training. But it was too late for them to really gel with the rest of the squad. Hence, they lost 3-0 to Manchester City.
According to reports, the three unnamed players played in the match which they lost on June 17, which implies that the player who earlier tested positive had tested negative twice before the kickoff.
If this is an excuse for their losses on the first day of the restart of the season, fans have been wondering what the excuse would be for the lost Arsenal suffered on Saturday in the hands of relegation-threatened Brighton. The 15th placed Brighton beat Arsenal 2-1 on Saturday to refresh the wounds they were nursing from their defeat to City on Wednesday.
The cracks in Arsenal
The manger of Arsenal, Mikel Arteta has taken responsibility for their Saturday’s lost but he has more problems in his hands as he has lost his first-choice goalkeeper Bernd Leno to injury. Also, two top players at the club Granit Xhaka and Pablo Mari are also out with different degrees of injuries.
There is also a scare that the English FA might take disciplinary action against the club’s midfielder Matteo Guendouzi who held the neck of Brighton’s Neal Maupay at the end of Saturday’s encounter. The Arsenal’s midfielder took such an action in protest of the injury their goalkeeper suffered from Maupay’s tackle during the match.
“When we show frustration we have to show it in the right way,” Mikel Arteta said. “I haven’t seen the images (of Guendouzi) or what happened, but we will talk about it if that is the case. Emotionally, we have to control the situations much better.”
