When Mikel Arteta first contracted Covid-19 in March 2020, it sent Arsenal into lockdown and led to football’s three-month shutdown.
Among their immediate priorities back then, along with the health of their manager, was rushing out gym equipment to their players’ houses so they could maintain fitness.
Fast forward 21 months and it is very much game on this time after Arteta was struck down by Covid once again.
Arsenal’s intriguing meeting with league leaders Manchester City this lunchtime — a clash of the league’s most in-form sides — will see Arteta, almost ever-present and all-action on the sideline, restricted to a room in his north London home while his team face one of football’s toughest challenges.
The club have ‘prepared for every scenario’, according to their head coach, with technology in place to enable him to deliver the pre-match team talk via video calling platform Teams and communicate with the bench during the game.
‘I will be by myself, fully focused in one room,’ Arteta said. ‘I will need a big room so that I can walk and move a little bit because I won’t be able to sit on my sofa.
‘It’s a big, big game for us and it’s really frustrating not to be able to be there helping the team, but I will do my best from here with everything that I can do.’
As well as Arteta, assistant coach Steve Round has been suffering from Covid — meaning the Gunners are down to just Albert Stuivenberg.
The former Manchester United assistant has been running training sessions this week, but Arteta has been across everything, receiving video footage of training sessions for review. And he will have the best view in the house this lunchtime, too.
‘I will have a special feed like the one I normally watch for all the games that we analyse,’ he said.
‘Yes (it is a different camera angle from the one on TV). Yes, the higher one. Hopefully we can use that one and give us a proper view.
‘I’ve never experienced what I’m going to experience (today). We have to adapt to it and we’ve tried to do it in the best possible way to get prepared.’
Arteta has suffered with mild symptoms from Covid second time around and admitted to having ‘a rough couple of days’.
He improved sufficiently to conduct his usual pre-match media duties despite concerns over his voice. Now it is over to his backroom team and players.
‘Albert and the other coaches will have complete freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right to do,’ he added.
‘I’m going to be here to support and help in certain moments, but they have to communicate with the players themselves.
‘I already discussed that with them and it will be down to them. The players are the ones who have to coach themselves.’
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