As I have said in previous posts, Odegaard's role is very important for Arsenal. Moreover, Rice is also absent due to a red card sanction. When these two players are absent, Arsenal find it difficult to dominate the match. Although Arsenal eventually won, the results they got were less than satisfactory. As we often discuss in many other posts, Arsenal really needs a pure striker when they have difficulty scoring goals. It doesn't mean that Harvertz, G. Jesus, Trossard are not competent, but they need a striker who can really be a Target Man in this case. For example, City, they can rely on Halaand in terms of scoring goals. In addition, other players can also score goals if they have the opportunity. Even so, I'm quite happy that Arsenal is back on the winning track. Thus, only two points away from the current leader of the standings occupied by Manchester City. And hopefully, Odegaard will recover soon and so will some of the newcomers, hopefully they will be fit to play their matches.
Honestly speaking the both players (Rice and Odegaard) are very important and there absence made the Arsenal side to be weak even if they got a win. And is really bad to see that whenever a key player is serving a ban or out due to injury it shows, which is not good for other teams to know their weakness, so Arsenal only prove that they can't play good football without some of these key players.
Other players can score goals but like you said Arsenal need a natural number 9, that position is extremely vacant, let's forget the fact that Kai Havertz is running that position and getting goals, no he's not a complete striker to me, no doubt he's trying but Arteta and Edu need to get someone to help the team.
Even if Odegaard takes like 2 more weeks to recover from his injury I still think Arteta need a plan B to get the business done because relying on a particular player isn't healthy if you want to win the league title and we know how Manchester City operate, when they need something they go all out for it, so I think Arteta need to reshuffle the team in case any sort of injuries or suspension comes up.
Yummy for the risk!
