Robin van Persie has shed some light on why his return from injury went wrong last season and in doing so, has shown why he is perhaps one of the least qualified to have declared himself fit for Holland’s match with Norway tonight:

After my previous injury, I made the mistake at Arsenal of kicking the ball with all my force in my first training session. I will not make that mistake again. But I do feel very good. I trained hard the last couple of days and all the tests were positive.

No doubt that van Persie has learned his lesson, the last two seasons must have been difficult for him in spending so much time ‘inactive’. The balance between club and country is always a difficult one to strike, the players want to have the ‘highest’ honour that they can individually achieve. However, it is the clubs who pay the wages and to continually read of injuries suffered whilst on international duty is enough to turn any manager’s hair grey or disappear faster than a bankers bonus.

van Persie, you feel, is wanting to make up for lost time:

I have been injured a lot lately but whatever the outside world says is not important to me. I just want to be fit and play as many games as I can. The entire pre-season went well at Arsenal and in the league too. Picking up a hamstring injury can happen to any player at the moment

Hamstrings are notoriously fickle. Years ago, the injuries were not as prevalent and sometimes it is hard to forget that with the improvements in fitness of players, this type of injury becomes more prevalent as any sprinter will testify. The next twenty-four hours is going to be nerve-wracking for Arsene as he awaits news of tonight’s matches, hoping that there are no further walking wounded boarding flights to London tomorrow.

Gael Clichy is the latest Arsenal player to talk to L’Equipe. According to the best left back in the world:

I will never forget what Dennis Bergkamp told me. It was in 2005 when I was injured. I had doubts and I didn’t feel fine. Bergkamp is a great man that doesn’t talk a lot. One day he came to see me and asked how long it would take for me to recover. I told him I didn’t know. He watched Ashley Cole, who was also having a treatment, and finally said: ‘Come back soon, and if you succeed, you will get his position.’ Dennis and Ashley are friends, but that simple sentence was so good to me. I held on, and then I recovered quickly.

It would be interesting to know when this exchange took place. If this were heard, maybe Bergkamp brought Cole’s paranoia about being one of the minority of Englishmen in the dressing room to the surface, failing to recognise the ‘pep talk’ element for Clichy. Looking at the players, I do not doubt that Clichy would have eased Cole out of the Arsenal team anyway. The Frenchman is, to my mind, the better left back with a more all-round game. Both are quick but Clichy has the edge and his distribution is less one dimensional. I know what you are thinking and no, I am not a bitter and twisted individual who simply hates Cole for being greedy. Clichy genuinely is better in my opinion and were he to add a couple of goals a season to his game, there is little doubt that he would be streets ahead of his predecessor.

On the subject of injuries, Tomas Rosicky’s agent is once more denying the rumours about his clients health:

What appeared in the press about Tomas being hospitalised in London is complete nonsense. Tomas, as part of his recovery scheme, visits the hospital for various therapies and the same happened last time. A sudden setback in his health or some headaches, as I have read about somewhere, have not happened to Tomas. Everything is going according to the plan. Tomas’ first comeback was rash, now we are treating the situation more carefully. The recovery will be long-term. The team of specialists that cares for Tomas, has been enlarged by another specialist which means the player will be cared for at the best level.

The only way these stories are going to end is when Rosicky returns to training and is available for selection. Until then, he is an easy target for rumours. When any return will be is anyone’s guess. I suspect even Arsene is not counting on it before the end of the season such has been the length of the Czech international’s absence.

Arsene has picked at the edges of another tiff with Michel Platini. It is not hard to visualise the head of UEFA exploding into rage when he reads Wenger’s views on the increased number of participants at Euro2012:

It looks like everybody, individually, understands the need to reduce the number of games but historically you always get more. It may be keeping everybody happy but I don’t think it will raise the level of the competition.

I can think of several hundred people who will not be happy with the increased number of games. They are called club managers or head coaches. Frankly the UEFA rationale for football is beginning to baffle me. Well, even more than it already did before. Everything they are doing is heading towards more inclusion – which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing – but when it dilutes the ‘product’, questions have to be asked.

If you look at the recent changes made to their competitions, the fallacy of Platini’s ‘romantic’ vision of football is highlighted. Increasing the number of teams at European Championships is beneficial to the individual nations but what exactly was wrong with having the sixteen best squads at a tournament? The streamlining of the Champions League to include ’smaller’ nations is fine but that erodes the strength of the competition, making the pool of winners smaller and more crucially for the money men, less attractive to sponsors. And that is before we even get onto the part about increasing the number of games players are involved in.

’til Tomorrow.