Per Mertesacker insists he is ready for FA Cup final despite making first Arsenal start in 13 months

The last time Per Mertesacker started any football match, for anyone, it was April 2016. Arsenal were facing Norwich City and even then it felt as if Arsene Wenger was starting to phase the German veteran out.

Now, almost 13 months on from that last start, Wenger is weighing up whether he throws Mertesacker back in. Against the best team in the country, on that big exposing Wembley pitch, with the FA Cup on the line, in a game that could mean so much for the future of the manager and the club.

Of course it is not ideal, but Wenger is facing one of the biggest selection crises of his long tenure. His top three centre-backs are out. What else is he meant to do?

Mertesacker only has one option himself, which is to be ready. He knows that he cannot make any solid promises after such a long time out. But that does not stop him from telling the fans, in an honest press interview on Wednesday afternoon, that he will give everything he has on the pitch. “I expect myself to be absolutely ready,” he says. “No matter what comes.”

But there is no getting past the fact that it is hard to think of any worse preparation than Mertesacker’s long freeze-out. Even his one appearance this season, from the bench against Everton last Sunday, only came when Laurent Koscielny had been sent off and Gabriel stretchered off. It was, for Mertesacker as well as for everyone else, “completely unexpected”.

It has been a strange and frustrating season for Mertesacker, and it all started last July, in a the first pre-season friendly of the summer, against Lens. “I just passed the ball, and I cracked my knee,” he remembers. “I didn’t realise with the adrenaline of the game, you just get through it. It ended up quite horrendous.”

Mertesacker needed surgery and did not return to training until December, and not to full training until February. The centre-back pairing was set as Koscielny and Shkodran Mustafi, with Gabriel and Rob Holding as back-ups. Mertesacker was clearly not in Wenger’s plans, although Arsenal did trigger the option in Mertesacker’s contract in December, meaning that he is here for the 2017-18 season too.

It looked as if Mertesacker would not be called upon this season, and so he was not involved with the Arsenal Under-23s even when fit. “I didn’t particularly ask for it, I never went to the boss” he shrugs, when asked why he did not even get an occasional run-out. “I was of the mindset that I didn’t need that for me to be prepared or mentally ready. I thought that when I got a game for the first team, it was enough for me. That was my mindset. So before Sunday, I didn’t have a proper game. Just training sessions.”

It might sound risky, but even at his peak Mertesacker was not exactly reliant on his pace. “I thought I could compensate with my experience, it felt like that, really good,” he says of his surprise appearance against Everton last weekend. “I didn’t feel like I missed something by [not] playing another game. Even if I had played two or three months ago, it would not have made a difference.”

Mertesacker did look very comfortable on Sunday, but if he plays tomorrow [Saturday] it will likely be in a back three, requiring even more readjustment. He has played elite professional football for 14 years now, and has 104 caps for Germany. But this is new even to him.

"With a back three everyone starts from zero, including me,” Mertesacker says. “I had never played in a back three, honestly. When I started as a youngster I played in a back four, that was my position from then on. But what it comes down to is knowing what the others are doing. Communication is the key in the system.”

But the evidence of Arsenal’s back three experiment so far is that it has given them a solidity that they lacked. Against Manchester City in the FA Cup semi-final it allowed them to sit deep, defend, challenging City to break them down, which they could not do. It might not be the Arsenal way but it worked.

Chelsea always used to beat Arsenal with reactive defensive football, but if Wenger is to turn the tables on Antonio Conte’s champions then his new system might be just the way to do it.

“We felt a little bit that being more compact, especially in the middle, and accepting sometimes, just defend. Just defend. Allowing ourselves to relax a little bit more. With a back four we thought ‘we have to get the ball, we have to play, we have to press.’”

That is what Arsenal did against City, forgetting their usual desperation to attack and allowing City to make their own mistakes. “Especially against Manchester City sometimes we allowed ourselves just to defend,” Mertesacker said. “Defend the box, from the box. Not even open ourselves up too much.”

It might not be the traditional Arsenal way, but it is more likely to work. Which, in an FA Cup final, is nothing to sniff at. “In football, at the end of the day, you want to be successful,” he said. “You have to adjust, no matter what the game brings to you, no matter how you feel about, you have to adjust. If that’s necessary for Arsenal, we do it.” Maybe Mertesacker’s fresh honesty is exactly what Arsenal need.