Hector Bellerin injured, will miss a month

Hard on the heels of news about Alexis Sanchez’ mystery injury, we got some bad news today about what originally appeared to be an injury to Hector Bellerin that was not suspected to be a big deal.

Well, whoops. It turns out that the “no big deal” injury means Bellerin will be out “three or four weeks”, which at first does indeed sound not huge - no Arsenal this weekend, and they should be able to cope, right? Let’s go look at...oh man, the upcoming fixtures. If he is out that full four weeks, he will miss:

- Manchester United next weekend
- PSG on 11/23
- Bournemouth, Southampton, and West Ham in the league (all probably survivable without him, but still)
- Basel on 12/6

A month from now is Stoke on the 10th December. So, yeah. A month that didn’t fill me with anxiety a week ago is all of a sudden starting to feel very, very wobbly.

As far as options go, we’re probably looking at Carl Jenkinson for the most part - the other options available, in descending order of preference, are Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Mathieu Debuchy, and in an extreme emergency, Shkodran Mustafi, who has played RB in the past for the German national team.