Bukayo Saka is just another victim of a game which can't leave its very best alone

The Arsenal winger is injured, an inevitable consequence in a game which doesn't seem able to look after its most valuable assets.

It was probably inevitable that it would end this way. Bukayo Saka pulled out of the England squad for their forthcoming matches against Australia and Italy. The exact point at which he pulled up during their 2-1 Champions League defeat at Lens felt like the end of something had been building for a while. He’d made an appearance in each of Arsenal’s previous 87 Premier League matches, and Lens was the point at which one of his hamstrings decided that enough was enough.

The timing…sub-optimal, for both club and country. Arsenal may have beaten Manchester City on Sunday afternoon, but few would have argued that they were stronger for him not being fit and in the team. And while England’s upcoming match against Australia is a friendly of little to no consequence, their other match against second-placed Italy certainly isn’t.

England have a six-point lead at the top of their group at present, but Italy have a game in hand and know that winning both would reduce that lead to goal difference only. Defeat would also reduce their advantage over Ukraine and North Macedonia to just three points. Ukraine are away to Malta on the same evening. So, not ideal.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mikel Arteta has come in for considerable criticism for overplaying Saka. It might be counter-argued that he has little choice. Arsenal simply do not have the multitudes of cover that Manchester City have. If Saka is fit and available, so the logic goes, doesn’t he have to play? Well, all of that is true, but Arsenal, with their 60,000 capacity enorm-o-dome and Champions League football can hardly plead poverty.

But that is rather getting away from the point. Footballers are athletes and athletes need rest. When they don’t get it, the risk of injury slowly reduces to one, and the cruelty of the trick is that it is impossible to say when that point is reached until it happens. At that point, all you can really do is keep your fingers crossed that the player concerned will only be missing for weeks, rather than months.

Football is hard on the body. The mixture of jogging and sprinting and its stop-start nature place extra stresses on both muscles and joints. Because muscle tears and strains are just the start. If the part of your body that decides to twang first turns out to be your anterior cruciate ligament, you’re looking at a potentially career-threatening injury. For players, the stakes are extremely high indeed. We’ve already seen a proliferation of serious injuries in among women players, and further research into this is clearly necessary.

The human body suffers from degradation due to wear and tear, and the professional game seems to working them harder than ever. The World Cup finals, for example, featured 16 teams and 38 matches in 1978. By 2026, the former will number will have trebled and the latter have increased by two and a half times. To reach the 1990 European Cup final, Milan and Benfica had to play eight games to reach the final. It’s now 14, and you can add an extra 10 to that if you’re starting at the preliminary round, not that anyone from that stage ever gets within a mile of the final.

And it’s not just the number of games that teams are playing, but the pace and intensity of the games themselves. When you watch the matches of the past, one of the most striking things about the games themselves is how damn slow they are. Balls are routinely just trundled back to goalkeepers and then punted back to eactly where they came from, so that everyone can have a bit of a breather. Nowadays, such is our rush to get on with the football that a goalkeeper being able to pick up a backpass looks a goalkeeper in a flat cap does to those of us in our middle years.

Every step of the way, we’ve chosen to remove protections. Among the Premier League’s recent wheezes have included matches having vast amounts of injury-time and blurring the rules of what constitutes a foul in order to allow for something called “common sense”. The number of games has increased, and the way in which those games is played has altered almost beyond recognition.

And this isn’t just about Arsenal. Erling Haaland is 23, and has played more than 300 competitive games for club and international sides. Kylian Mbappe is 24, and has played more than 400. It appears to be endemic to professional football to seek to test players to the point of destruction, to keep playing them and playing until they go wrong, and then hoping that what has gone wrong isn’t too serious. It seems like a very strange way to treat assets with value running to tens or hundreds of millions of pounds.