Arsene Wenger admits Santi Cazorla’s recovery from injury is taking longer than expected and has not put a timeframe on the midfielder’s return to action for Arsenal.

At the start of December, the Spaniard required surgery to fix an ankle problem and was expected to be sidelined for three months.

But Wenger now concedes that the 32-year-old will return later than he first believed.

“At the moment he’s far – it’s not going as quickly as I imagined it,” said the Arsenal manager.

“It could be a bit longer [than the original three-month timeframe].

“At the moment, I don’t really know, I just have a schedule that he’s not planned to go outside and run.

“Once a player goes outside and runs without any problems you count six weeks [for his return].

“In January he certainly won’t play.”

Arsenal cannot rely on producing goals of the season every week. Olivier Giroud’s scorpion flick on Sunday was an astonishing way to end an incisive counter-attack.

But even as Arsenal’s season stabilises again, with two league wins following two league defeats, there is a serious question to ask: how do they play at their best without Santi Cazorla? The Spanish midfielder underwent surgery on 7 December.

He will not return until the middle of February, at the earliest, robbing Arsenal of their midfield brain, the man who makes the whole team tick.

Cazorla might not be Arsenal’s best player but he is certainly their most important. Any Arsenal player will confirm this and will routinely describe Cazorla as the very best that they have in training.

The problem for Arsenal is that Cazorla is so good that the rest of the team has grown dependent on him for direction and control, for finding the forwards early and in space.

Take Cazorla out of the team and Arsenal can still break forward at speed but they cannot pick their way through a clever defence, not in the same way.