Arsenal suffered one of the biggest upsets in the 66-year history of the League Cup on Tuesday night, losing 5-3 on penalties to League Two side Fleetwood Town after a 1-1 draw at Highbury.

Mikel Arteta heavily rotated his side for the trip, but this was still a team packed with internationals, facing a side 84 places below them in the English football pyramid. Several key players were missing, though, and Arteta later confirmed that some of those absences were down to injury.

According to Paul Merson, one of them would have made all the difference.

Paul Merson says Declan Rice would have changed the result

Merson won the League Cup with Arsenal back in 1993, which was also the club’s last success in the competition, and he admitted the trophy gave him “one of my happiest moments in football”. But speaking on Sky Sports after the game, he made it clear who Arsenal had missed most.

“You look at Declan Rice and you look at Odegaard. They’re the two that have to play,” Merson said. “When they play, they’ve got every chance of winning a football match. If Rice plays today, I’m afraid Fleetwood wouldn’t have won.”

Merson felt that only one Arsenal player rose to the occasion: Martin Odegaard, who came on at half-time and lifted the tempo. “They’ll be going, ‘What a player Odegaard is. What a player. He’s unreal.’ You wouldn’t say that about the others,” he said, adding that while Arsenal “worked hard”, the performance “wasn’t there”. He was particularly unimpressed with Kai Havertz and Viktor Gyokeres, saying they “didn’t play well”.

It’s hard to argue with him on Rice. The England midfielder has been one of Arsenal’s best players this season, with his role evolving to give him more freedom in the final third, and he scored the late equaliser against Bayern Munich last week.

The worry for Arsenal is whether he’ll be back for Liverpool. Merson suggested Rice would return at the weekend, but Arteta revealed after the game that the midfielder had “picked up something the other day” in the win over Everton. Hopefully, his absence from the Fleetwood game was mainly precautionary.