Zubi prepares for the Christmas season – Suburban Gooners

Morning Gooners and welcome Wednesday. We will be on the second day of the team’s training sessions and yesterday photos were released from the first day, which included missing players like Havertz and Gabriel as we expected, but not Martin Zubimendi. Apparently he was training indoors as the club tried to manage his load management, which we can understand when we look at the minutes he has played this season. He is among those who have played the most minutes this season, along with Raya and Rice, having started 15 games with 1,319 minutes played so far. He won’t be surprised to have played so much; he is a key cog in Arteta’s team and when he is in the team we are clearly more fluid and have a more balanced structure. He’s used to being that main cog; he played 2,962 minutes in 36 games last season for Real Sociedad and with 16 games played in the Premier League, he’s on track to get similar numbers for The Arsenal (if you extrapolate, he’s trending towards 3,132 minutes this season). But in all competitions, last season he played 3,955 minutes in 48 matches, while this season, in all competitions, he played 1,757 minutes in 21 matches. If he wants to play 55 games in all competitions – which I would expect given how we look to go deep in all competitions (as well as his minutes in Spain) – then you’re looking at a potential 4,601 minutes in 2025/26.

That’s a lot of football.

And given our injury record this season, I totally understand that he might be training indoors, on a series of ‘light’ training sessions this week, because with games coming one after another over Christmas, losing him is not something we want to accept. And he will also have to do something he has never done before, having never played outside of Spain until this season: no winter break. La Liga stops on Tuesday until January 2 and, under normal circumstances, Zubi could be back home resting his weary bones. But this season, during the same period, he could probably play four matches:

• Palace in the League Cup
• Brighton in the Premier League
• Villa in the Premier League
• Bournemouth in the Premier League

GOOD, technically Bournemouth will take place on January 3, but that’s still quite a long schedule and not something the Spaniard will be used to. So for him it makes sense to take it slow and for the club to be aware of the change at this time of year. I wonder if they will handle his minutes at Christmas as well. If – going through everything saying that and hoping for Christmas miracles – we can win games by a decent margin, I suspect he could be a candidate for an early exit from games. We have Norgaard, we have Rice, it makes sense. But these matches will all be close, I suspect, so I just hope we can be reasonable and if players look like they’re struggling we’ll take them out.

However, we need it to come back. I thought I’d heard rumors that Havertz was targeting the remaining games in December to get fit and sure, he still has opportunities to train this week, but I doubt he’ll make it to Everton. If we’re lucky, he might make an appearance at home against Brighton on December 27, but considering he’s barely played football in 2025 as a whole, I think his minutes will be managed until the new year. This means that there is still an opportunity for Gyokeres and Gabriel Jesus and they must view this period as an opportunity to be seized. We can’t see games in which Gyokeres gets five or ten touches and hardly any attempts on target. Yes, we have to feed it, but it also has to be in these positions to be fed. And he must anticipate better, like Saka’s opportunity which presented itself on goal in the first half against Wolves.

It’s up to him, our creative players to spot the runs, which I hope is one of the things they look at this week. I’ll start doing my previews of the Everton game tomorrow, but you might expect Everton not to be playing ‘park the bus’ football at home in front of their own fans on Saturday night. They will want to show that they can mix with anyone and with 24 points and currently being ninth in the table, they have shown that they are no slouch as a team. They beat Forest, Bournemouth, United (with a man down), The Scum, as well as Brighton at home. There are some decent results against decent teams, so we’ll have to be wary of their threat.

We also have a pretty terrible record there lately. Last season it was a 1-1 draw, the season before we had a scrappy 1-0, but in the previous five we lost four and drew one. Everton have a good home record against us and we need to put that right on Saturday – it won’t be easy with the evening kicking off with the home fans riled up and exhilarated with the last league game before Christmas.

But Arsenal and Arteta still have two days of preparation before traveling on Friday, so hopefully they’ve done all their homework, some of those things that Arteta said had “gone down” due to no training can be reset, so we’re in the best possible shape to go about business on Saturday night.

I’ll be back tomorrow as we start to look in a little more detail at what Everton will bring from a tactical and statistical perspective.

Catch you all then.