Arsenal came from behind to beat Leeds 2-1 at Emirates Stadium on Saturday. By Monday, Mikel Arteta was explaining how his squad had lost two players in the minutes after the final whistle.
Piero Hincapie and Martin Zubimendi both suffered ankle injuries in a post-match conditioning session on the Emirates pitch — a small-sided game staged for players who had not been given minutes. Hincapie, who had come on in the 82nd minute, was carried from the field on the back of goalkeeper Illan Meslier. Zubimendi, an unused substitute against Leeds, was hurt in the same session.
Both will miss Tuesday’s Champions League meeting with Lille, Arsenal’s first home game of the 2026-27 league phase, and both are awaiting scan results.
“It’s far from ideal,” Arteta said. “They’re both going to miss tomorrow’s match, that’s for sure. Piero’s one looks a little bit more serious, I think, but we have to wait and see.”
Two players lost after the whistle, not during it
The session that produced the injuries is routine rather than improvised. Arteta regularly puts unused and barely used players through extra work immediately after matches, so that the squad’s physical output stays broadly level through a congested fixture list. A defender who plays eight minutes and a midfielder who plays none cannot be asked to start three days later without having run.
That logic is standard across elite football. The outcome on Saturday was not. Hincapie needed help from a teammate to leave a pitch he had just been running on in a competitive match, a sequence Arteta said had no precedent in his time at the club.
“It has never happened in seven years that I have been here,” he said.
The frustration is sharpened by context. Arsenal had just recovered from a shaky afternoon: James Justin put Leeds ahead in the 55th minute before Riccardo Calafiori converted Ben White’s header at close range on 62 minutes and substitute Bruno Guimaraes finished a flowing move eight minutes later. It was a response to a 3-0 defeat at Brighton either side of the international break, and it moved Arsenal level on points with Manchester City at the top of the Premier League. The cost arrived after the points were secured.
Arteta defends a practice he will not drop
Asked whether the sessions were worth the risk, Arteta’s answer was pointed rather than apologetic.
“Very easy, you don’t train! Never train, and they don’t get injured,” he said. “But the consequence is, when they play, they have no rhythm.”
He also offered the numbers behind the decision. By his count, the extra sessions were run 37 times last season without producing a single injury. On Saturday, two went in the space of a few actions.
“In two very unfortunate actions, we lost two players,” he said. “It’s a sport of contact, and this can happen.”
There was a dry postscript: “If I had a crystal ball I would just say ‘guys, get in the jacuzzi’.”
The exchange touches a live tension in squad management. Load-monitoring departments now plan weekly minutes to tight tolerances, and fringe players are the hardest group to serve — too fresh to recover, too undercooked to be trusted. The alternatives to contact work are gym sessions and solo running, neither of which reproduces match intensity. Arteta’s position is that rhythm has to be bought somewhere, and that the bill on Saturday was unusual rather than structural.
A thinner squad heading into a heavy run
The timing matters more than the mechanism. Arsenal are already without William Saliba, who has not played since sustaining a back injury at the World Cup. Arteta said the defender has been training individually and is “building his capacity to good standards,” but he is not expected back before the November international break, with the club taking a deliberately cautious line on his return. Christos Tzolis is out with a hamstring injury picked up on international duty and has been ruled out for several weeks.
Losing Hincapie compounds the Saliba absence directly. The 24-year-old Ecuador defender has been used off the bench three times in the league this season, exactly the sort of rotation option a side chasing four competitions needs in October rather than May. Zubimendi’s absence is felt differently: the Spain midfielder is the control mechanism in front of the defence, and his unused status on Saturday was itself a product of planning for Tuesday.
Lille arrive at the Emirates having lost 3-2 to Real Betis in their opening league-phase match. Arsenal, who beat Napoli 1-0 in Naples through Martin Odegaard’s second-half goal, should still have enough. The longer question is what the scans say — and whether a squad that has handled the first weeks of the season well can absorb two injuries it never had to risk.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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