Proposal: Javi Gracia should tell us why Wilf Gnonto isn’t playing
Wilf, if you’re reading this, blink once for ‘ankle still hurts’, blink twice for ‘this weirdo hates me’.
I suspected it would come to this, although I didn’t expect this would be the reason. But when Javi Gracia took over from Jesse Marsch, one of the first pleasant discoveries was that he was content to carry on like Michael Skubala and tell the press, in their press conferences, basically nothing. After ten months of oversharing from Jesse, it was easy to bless the contrast. It was also easy to predict that Gracia’s stubborn silence would soon become annoying in its own way.
Like this way: he won’t tell us why Wilf Gnonto isn’t playing, and we all really want to know. There could be some very good reasons! He played in four of Gracia’s first games in charge, starting two, and started the FA Cup match at Fulham. Then he hurt his ankle playing for Italy, so he was out of the squad at Arsenal, unused from the bench against Nottingham Forest, and got half an hour against Crystal Palace, quarter of an hour against Liverpool, ten minutes against Fulham. And nothing against Leicester. It’s still only a month since he limped out of international duty, so it’s reasonable to think the ankle injury could still be bothering him.
But if that’s the case, just tell us!
Gracia has a policy of not commenting on injuries to individual players, and it’s fine in general, but Javi my pal rules are made to be broken. And in this case, simply saying, ‘The advice from our medical staff is that Wilf’s ankle can’t sustain more minutes’, makes the whole problem of being asked about why Gnonto isn’t playing go away. And that’s win-win for everyone!