Declan Rice breaks silence with five-word message after injury forced Arsenal star off

Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice appeared to suffer a calf injury during the latter stages of Wednesday's win against Brentford at the Emirates Stadium

Declan Rice has posted a message on social media after he suffered an injury scare during Arsenal's 2-0 win against Brentford on Wednesday.

The 26-year-old put in another superb performance for the Gunners but limped off with seven minutes to go after appearing to sustain a calf problem.

Rice was replaced by Viktor Gyokeres for the closing stages and the Swede helped Mikel Arteta's side get over the line and secure another important three points in their Premier League title bid.

Speaking post-match, Arteta cut a concerned figure when talking about Rice. "Obviously it's never good news," the Spaniard said. "Declan had to come off. We don't know.

"We have to see tomorrow what he's got. He can walk. He cannot play. The thing is, he's played a lot of minutes but as well, now we played Wednesday night and we have to play Saturday morning as well."

Rice then took to Instagram and uploaded three separate stories following the game. The first one showed him walking out on the Emirates Stadium turf with the caption: "+3 back to winning ways [red love heart emoji]."

His second featured him running out of the tunnel, before his third captured him alongside England team-mate and ex-Brentford man Ivan Toney. Rice said: "Good to see my brother!! @ivantoney1 [red love heart emoji]."

Goals from Mikel Merino and Bukayo Saka ensured the Gunners increased their lead at the top of the Premier League to five points.

Arsenal's advantage had been reduced to two points following Manchester City's dramatic 5-4 win at Fulham, but Arteta's side recorded their seventh win in nine league matches to move further clear.

Assessing his side's performance against Brentford, Arteta said: "I think we had three big chances to score the second goal. We didn't do it, and then when we were going for the second one, the game became a little bit open.

"We started to be a bit late in certain moments in the high press, they break it and the pitch is stretched. Then we needed to be a bit more compact.

"But I think we went through that period really well when we started to take the ball and do what we had to do with the ball to bring the momentum down, bring the composure and the ball to the areas that we wanted to attract them and to use the open spaces that they left and score a second goal."

Wednesday's game against Brentford was Arsenal's fourth fixture in 10 days after going up against Tottenham, Bayern Munich and Chelsea within the space of a week. And the Gunners now have another couple of days to prepare for a difficult-looking trip to Aston Villa on Saturday lunchtime.

Bemoaning the fixture list, Arteta added: "It's probably not one thing, but we can help the players and everybody in the league and everybody to do what we have to do, give it another day.

"Especially the teams that are playing so much in Europe. To everybody in general, I think we can do that because we're going to benefit from that. We've never had such a schedule on every level, not only in the Premier League, but every competition internationally as well.

"So we need to try to do that, please. I think it's common sense. I think at some point this becomes too much, you know, and the players are not machines. But we have to try to do that when we can. "