Arsenal: What Wayne Rooney’s Fitness Means To Wenger

Arsenal is facing a battered Manchester United, but they may have the services of their captain Wayne Rooney after all. So what?

The Manchester United side that takes the pitch against Arsenal is going to look much different than expected. Their injuries have been talked about for the past two weeks, with key absences from Smalling, Bailly, Marouane Fellaini and more. Not to mention Zlatan, who is out with a suspension.

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Wayne Rooney was supposed to miss the match as well, but Jose Mourinho has just now stated that the captain is ready to play against Arsenal and we may very well see him gallivanting about the Theater of Dreams.

So what does that mean for the Gunners? What happens now that Rooney is on the pitch? What is the threat level increase, if any? What are the implications?

Well, I’m here to help. To help speculate, that is.

For starters, Wayne Rooney’s presence doesn’t scare me all that much. It’s hard to say one way or the other whether his presence makes United better or worse off. He is a known commodity. Arsenal has faced him countless times and, for the most part, he isn’t a Gunner-killer.

The question we have to ask is, with a midfielder like Granit Xhaka who hasn’t faced United all that much, would you rather face a brand new attack, a young attack, with some lesser known options or would you rather face someone who is more talented, but more known?

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It’s a tough one to call, but I think that Rooney’s presence, assuming he starts, actually makes the Red Devil’s less fearsome. He is not having his best year and honestly, the less variables the Gunner’s have to face, the better.

Throwing out an attack full of youngsters, like Louis van Gaal had to do last year, was dastardly because they weren’t as well known. Arsenal had not faced them all that threat. It threw a wrench into the Gunner’s plans and they couldn’t cope.

While I would have far more faith in Kostafi to deal with that ‘unknown’ threat, it still makes me more nervous facing an attack that we know less of, but has a tremendous amount of athleticism.

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Rooney can be dealt with just fine, as the Premier League has been showing us this year. There is no reason to doubt Xhaka or Coquelin’s ability to stifle the aging, one-footed Englishman.