Mikel Arteta has cooled any fears that Arsenal’s injury crisis has worsened after insisting the changes he made against Preston were pre-planned.
The Gunners have been hit hard by injuries of late and Ben White missed Wednesday night’s Carabao Cup fourth round win.
Arteta played a strong team for the 3-0 victory at Deepdale and fans will have been concerned after both Jurrien Timber and Mikel Merino were taken off at half-time.
But Arsenal boss Arteta said after the game: “It was planned. We have a lot of issues in the backline.
“We wanted to share the minutes, because we lost Gabi [Magalhaes], we lost Ben as well on top of other players.
“We wanted to be competitive but we had to make sure that we protected players because we have a lot of big games coming up.”
Arsenal also took the decision to bring on Bukayo Saka during the victory at Preston, despite the Gunners being 3-0 up at the time.
The winger, who had been out this month with a calf injury before returning to score against Liverpool on Sunday, came on for the final 30 minutes in Lancashire.
“He (Saka) always says: ‘Once I’m here, I prefer to have a few minutes’,” said Arteta.
“As well we wanted to protect Gabi [Martinelli] because he had quite a big impact in the first half, so it worked quite well.”
