Mikel Arteta has cooled any fears that Arsenal’s injury crisis has worsened after insisting the changes he made against Preston were pre-planned.

The Gunners have been hit hard by injuries of late and Ben White missed Wednesday night’s Carabao Cup fourth round win.

Arteta played a strong team for the 3-0 victory at Deepdale and fans will have been concerned after both Jurrien Timber and Mikel Merino were taken off at half-time.

But Arsenal boss Arteta said after the game: “It was planned. We have a lot of issues in the backline.

“We wanted to share the minutes, because we lost Gabi [Magalhaes], we lost Ben as well on top of other players.

“We wanted to be competitive but we had to make sure that we protected players because we have a lot of big games coming up.”

Arsenal also took the decision to bring on Bukayo Saka during the victory at Preston, despite the Gunners being 3-0 up at the time.

The winger, who had been out this month with a calf injury before returning to score against Liverpool on Sunday, came on for the final 30 minutes in Lancashire.

“He (Saka) always says: ‘Once I’m here, I prefer to have a few minutes’,” said Arteta.

“As well we wanted to protect Gabi [Martinelli] because he had quite a big impact in the first half, so it worked quite well.”