Theo Walcott made his long-awaited return from the knee injury that kept him out for nine months and wrecked his World Cup dream as Arsenal\u2019s Under 21s were held by Blackburn.<\/p>\n
The England star played 45 minutes of the match at Boreham Wood, easing himself back into competitive injury after only returning to full training on Monday.<\/p>\n
When Walcott was taken off on a stretcher in Arsenal\u2019s FA Cup third round derby with Tottenham on January 4, nobody could have known it would take the England winger 286 days before returning to action.<\/p>\n
Missing the World Cup would have hurt, as would being absent from Arsenal\u2019s FA Cup triumph at Wembley in May and Walcott will desperately want to make up the lost time now that\u00a0\u00a0 he has returned.<\/p>\n
This was a gentle reintroduction – there were a few tantalising glimpses of that trademark pace as he skipped away from the Blackburn defenders.<\/p>\n
There were also a few inaccurate passes and under-hit crosses as he tries to rediscover that sharpness, but that\u2019s to be expected.<\/p>\n
With Arsene Wenger in the midst of a debilitating injury crisis, Walcott\u2019s return to the competitive arena will be most welcome.<\/p>\n
The Arsenal boss is without Mesut Ozil, Olivier Giroud, Aaron Ramsey and Yaya Sanogo for Saturday\u2019s visit of Hull City. Every day seems to bring fresh injury headaches.<\/p>\n
So there is a chance he\u2019ll be in the squad for Wednesday\u2019s Champions League trip to Anderlecht but, on this evidence, he perhaps needs a few more minutes under his belt before his first-team introduction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Theo Walcott made his long-awaited return from the knee injury that kept him out for nine months and wrecked his World Cup dream as Arsenal\u2019s Under 21s were held by Blackburn. The England star played 45 minutes of the match at Boreham Wood, easing himself back into competitive injury after only returning to full training […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,80],"tags":[37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4857,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions\/4857"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}