Arsenal's injury-afflicted defenders Hector Bellerin and Rob Holding are likely to be back to full sharpness - at least relative to the rest of the Premier League - when English football resumes later this month, according to the Gunners' former head of high performance Darren Burgess.
Both Bellerin and Holding ruptured the anterior cruciate ligaments in their right knee during the 2018/19 season and have endured further problems even after returning from their initial spells on the sidelines.
Holding missed several weeks before Christmas with deep bruises to his knee whilst football.london revealed in March that Bellerin had been playing whilst carrying a thigh injury for several months before the Premier League was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The three month hiatus, which will come to an end when Arsenal travel to Manchester City on June 17, has given players across the league a chance to rebuild their fitness whilst it also means that when play resumes everyone will be at much the same level in terms of match sharpness.
That will be particularly welcome for Holding, who found opportunities hard to come by under Arteta as he struggled to rebuild his fitness. Burgess, who was the club's fitness chief between 2017 and 2019, expects the former Bolton centre-back and Bellerin to return as well prepared for action as anyone else.
“Hector and Rob would be really happy with the break," Burgess told the Arsecast. "It will have brought other players down a bit because they’ll have lost match fitness and it’ll allow them [to be more equal].
“They’re both unbelievably diligent workers, they’ll have worked on those weaknesses and they’ll come back to as good a level as everybody else, just because of the break.
“Certainly for those players who have weaknesses and deficiencies, this is a perfect opportunity to work on those, particularly with the resources available to them in terms of the number of staff that they can consult with, the home gyms and things like that. There’s not much of an excuse to not correct those issues.”
Arsenal returned to full contact training last week and hope to organise two friendlies - one of which is believed to be against West Ham - before returning to action in under a fortnight's time.
Burgess believes that a timescale of around three weeks is not necessarily ideal but ought to be sufficient for players to recover much of their fitness.
Asked which players would be best placed when football resumed, he said: “The players that aren’t as explosive are probably going to be at an advantage here as they don’t require as much stress on their muscle and players that don’t have the injury history. Generally centre-halves, centre midfielders.
“I’m thinking David Luiz, [Sokratis] Papa[stathopoulos], those guys who haven’t had the injury history that [Shkodran] Mustafi or Hector Bellerin might have had.
“I don’t know too much about some of the other players but someone like Auba has been injury free for almost his whole career. He has had an amazing run for such an explosive player because his game relies on that explosivity.
"That’s going to put him at risk but the fact he has had very few injuries will be a massive plus and the fact he has a great work ethic will help him out.”
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