Arteta Prepares for London Derby Without Merino and Timber

Mikel Arteta will walk into the London Stadium on Sunday with the core of his Champions League heroes ready to go again – but still without Mikel Merino and Jurrien Timber.

Fresh from that bruising, historic win over Atletico Madrid in the Champions League semi-final, the Arsenal manager confirmed that every player involved on Tuesday night is fit and available for the derby against West Ham United. The group that dragged the club to the brink of a European final goes again.

Merino and Timber, though, remain stuck on the outside looking in.

“No chance for the weekend,” Arteta admitted, bluntly, when asked about the pair. Their recovery still has “a fair bit to do,” and the clock on the season is ticking loudly. For either of them to feature before the campaign closes, everything now has to fall perfectly into place: no setbacks, no pauses, no missteps.

Merino’s lay-off always looked like a long one. Timber’s has been the slow burn that hurts more.

Arteta did not hide how testing the defender’s absence has been. The Dutchman hadn’t expected to be out this long; neither had his manager. That gap between expectation and reality has been the hardest part to manage.

“That’s been probably the most difficult thing to manage with the player, with myself as well,” Arteta said. “We didn’t expect it to take so long, and at the moment, he’s not fit to play.”

So Arsenal go into a critical league fixture without two players who were meant to deepen and harden this squad. Yet the picture around them has brightened.

Bukayo Saka and Ben White, the heartbeat of the right flank, are available again and thriving. Since Saka’s return last month, their partnership has snapped back into place almost instantly. The angles, the overlaps, the underlaps – all the little automatisms that come only from years of playing together – have reappeared at full speed.

“When you talk about the right units, I think the amount of minutes that they’ve played this season has been extremely low for different circumstances,” Arteta reflected. That scarcity has made their recent run together feel even more valuable.

He relishes what he sees down that side. The connection is obvious: White stepping infield or driving outside, Saka drifting into pockets or pinning full-backs, the two of them reading each other almost before the ball moves. “They have a really good connection, a really good understanding, they have played many years together and you can sense that and notice that in a really positive way.”

Saka and White are not the only returnees. One glance at the bench against Atletico told its own story. Where a year ago Arsenal were stretched thin at the sharp end of the season, this time Arteta could turn and see genuine options, genuine quality, real game-changers in reserve.

“Very important, it’s great to see,” he said of the growing numbers back in contention. The contrast with last spring is stark in his mind: a deeper bench, more experience, more variety. This is what a squad built for a title and a Champions League run is supposed to look like.

Arteta has also tried to manage the load in the last week, rotating just enough to keep key players sharp without breaking the team’s rhythm. He felt the benefit in midweek – fresher legs, quicker reactions, more intensity in the decisive moments.

“You could sense that as well,” he said. “As I said from the beginning, that’s the most important thing. If we have that, we have a bigger chance to achieve the goal.”

The goal is clear now, even if Arteta will not spell it out every time he sits behind a microphone. A Champions League final in sight. A title race still alive. A London derby next in line.

He will go into it without Merino and Timber, and that still stings. But with Saka and White back in tandem, and a bench that finally looks like it belongs to a contender, Arsenal arrive in east London looking less like a team hanging on – and more like one ready to decide how this season ends.