Arsenal’s hopes of navigating a crucial seven-day period have suffered a significant blow after five first-team regulars failed to appear at training on Tuesday.
The north London club are preparing to host Sporting in the second leg of their Champions League quarter-final on Wednesday evening, with a vital Premier League encounter away to title rivals Manchester City following on Sunday.
However, concerns mounted at the Sobha Realty Training Centre when Riccardo Calafiori, Martin Odegaard, Declan Rice, Bukayo Saka and Jurrien Timber were all conspicuously absent from the session.
The timing could hardly be worse for Mikel Arteta’s side during such a defining stretch of fixtures.
Of the five absentees, Rice was the sole player to feature in Saturday’s 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth, completing the entire 90 minutes against the Cherries.
His failure to train on Tuesday does not necessarily rule him out of Wednesday’s European encounter, though it remains a source of concern for the coaching staff.
Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice are doubts for Arsenal’s clash with Sporting
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The remaining quartet have been sidelined for several weeks already.
Odegaard and Calafiori were the most recent to see action, both participating in the FA Cup quarter-final defeat at Southampton on Easter Saturday, with the Norwegian starting and the Italian coming off the bench in the 2-1 loss.
Football clubs with the most Champions League titles | GETTY
Arsenal reached the semi-finals of the Champions League last season before losing to Paris Saint-Germain.
And another last-four place awaits if they’re able to overcome Sporting, who have proven to be one of the biggest surprises of the competition so far.aragraphs
Speaking after Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to Bournemouth, meanwhile, Arteta insisted that his team were capable of turning things around following a difficult run of results.
“We know what is at stake, and the fact that as a club we haven’t done it for so long is a reason for that, it talks about the difficulty,” he said.
Kai Havertz struck late as Arsenal beat Sporting Lisbon in the first leg
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“But I just want to focus on the things that we can control, dominate and we have done.
“It’s not like we have to do a lot of new things that we haven’t done, no, let’s keep doing a lot of it.
“Or almost all the things that we’ve done for nine months, because that’s what has taken us all the way there, and on Wednesday, I saw a lot of them, and today, we’ve gone back, so we need to learn, we need to be very critical to ourselves, and then pick ourselves up, because on Wednesday we have a big one coming up.”
Sporting will go into the clash on a high after a 1-0 victory over Estrela Amadora last time out.
