Arsenal Squad Announced - Injury List Growing

The squad for Tuesday's Champions League game at AZ Alkmaar has just been named and here it is:

Vito Mannone, Manuel Almunia, Carlos Vela, Robin van Persie, William Gallas, Bacary Sagna, Kieran Gibbs, Thomas Vermaelen, Mikael Silvestre, Gael Clichy, Andrey Arshavin, Fran Merida, Jack Wilshere, Aaron Ramsey, Cesc Fabregas, Emmanuel Eboue, Abou Diaby, Alex Song.

Theo Walcott is out after the tough challenge from Ridgewell on Saturday but it's not been revealed how long he will be out for. Worryingly Tomas Rosicky is also out. Again no further news. Let's hope they are both short term and are back soon.

They join Nicklas Bendtner, Denilson, Eduardo, Lukasz Fabianski and Johan Djourou on the injury list. The worst seemed to be over on this front but we are in danger of being overwhelmed with injuries once again. We seem especially hard hit in attacking positions. If RvP gets injured who exactly is going to play there from the squad above?

I said early on this season that much could depend on our luck with injuries and while you could say that about any team I don't think any of the "big four" in England have as much of a gap between their first 11 and say the next 7 or 8 players as we do. That is partly as some of our first 11 are performing fantastically well (RvP, Cesc, Arshavin, Gallas and Vermaelen) and it's pretty hard to have players to just step in and continue that from the bench.

Despite this, the squad above should be strong enough to at least scratch out a draw tomorrow and take us one point closer to qualification. Hopefully some of the injured will be back by Sunday and the injuries won't drag on forever as some of ours tend to. I hope we are not talking about "if only" and "what if" at the end of the season with injuries robbing us of crucial players at important times of the season.

We've got some big games coming up so we really need to keep the good run we are on going.

And finally, here is something that made me chuckle from Wenger's post match email:

Alex Song was strong and smooth in his defensive midfield role. He is not rigid, he is agile. He is a slalom player and is not a straight-line player. He uses that very well, he has a good combination of strengths and agility and I believe as well he uses his technique in a very intelligent way. He likes a tackle. Cameroon people are strong - in Africa they call them the Germans of Africa because of their strong bodies.

Strong and smooth? He sounds like a pint of bitter. Also amusing to see that national stereotypes are used in other continents too. I wonder who the French of Africa are?