Newcastle have made two mistakes with Hatem Ben Arfa – and the first one was risking him in the meaningless Europa league tie at home to CS Maritimo on 22nd November when he hobbled off with a hamstring injury after 40 minutes – to the dismay of Newcastle fans.
Ben Arfa – after scoring brilliant goal last time out at Fulham
And then Newcastle brought him back for the game at Fulham on 10th December, and while he was Man of the Match and scored a brilliant goal to get Newcastle back to 2-1 in that game, he was brought off after 70 minutes.
And it seems the Frenchman had a recurrence of the hamstring strain, and we know he’s behind both Yohan Cabaye and Steven Taylor in terms of when he will be back.
Yohan and Steven were in light training all last week, and both maybe could be in the squad for the game at Norwich, but only if fit – and they could possibly start the game on the bench.
But no word on Ben Arfa other than that – and we are interested in what his status is- simply because the mercurial Frenchman has skills galore, and offers some creativity to the Newcastle play, which has been sorely missing for the last couple of months.
We’d really like to know when Ben Arfa is due back in training, but no word from Newcastle lately on just how severe his injury is.
Comments welcome.
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201 comments so far
Rotonda heights
Jan 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM
Comment #201to all the Pardew lovers. I get the injuries issue to a point as an excuse. But why can’t you explain all his other weird and wonderful antics such as playing Benny in a totally meaningless match, weird formations, hoof ball, negative approach to try not to lose more than win, bizarre subs, no plan B, banning fans from his one tactic training sessions, passive acceptance of our situation with uninspiring body language to match the players. Colo the captain and Ba chief scorer both openly saying they don’t like the style. Colo may be a winner, Pardew certainly isn’t.
All you ever say is injuries and not enough players but you never give satisfactory reasons for these and many other valid questions like why is Hughton doing so well on very limited resources.