Max Dowman is arriving. In a sense, the ankle injury he picked up in December has probably been helpful in terms of cooling the conversation around him and delaying the dilemma for Mikel Arteta about how he accommodates this player. Because from everything I have seen, he is ready.
Whether Dowman is psychologically or physically ready over a long period of time, I do not yet know, only the people closest to the player and inside the club can make a good forecast on that. But if you watched his appearances for Arsenal so far without any knowledge of his age or experience, you would pitch him as one of the best players in the team. That is how good he is.
At this stage of the season, I think Arsenal are involved in too many big games at the sharp end of the campaign to truly accommodate Dowman on a long-term basis. It reminds me an awful lot of when a 16-year-old Cesc Fabregas made some appearances in the League Cup during the Invincibles season. It was immediately clear that he was ready to be a starting player in one of the best teams in Europe.
In 2003-04, Arsenal reached the semi-finals of both domestic cups and the quarter-finals of the Champions League. Unless my memory is totally deserting me I believe Cesc picked up a small injury during that season too. The conversation around Fabregas’ emergence was put on the backburner but not for long. Sooner or later, Arsene Wenger had to consider how to best place this generational talent on a more regular basis.
I think Dowman can be used as an impact player towards the end of the season, with Merino and Odegaard injured and Havertz’s reintroduction requiring kid gloves, there is a role for Dowman as a left-footed midfielder I think. But the Arsenal squad is crowded and if his development continues, we will be very quickly thinking about increasing his role and given the size of the Gunners squad, someone is probably going to have to move out of his way.
I don’t think we need to decide exactly who that is yet, circumstances will decide. I wonder how much of a coincidence it is that Saka, Nwaneri, Lewis-Skelly and Dowman have all emerged from the academy as left-footers. It’s not a conversation we need to have right now but, again, sooner or later, we have to consider whether the team can accommodate all three of Dowman, Nwaneri and Saka given their similarities- unless one of them can develop into a left-winger.
That is how it was for Fabregas. Collective memory suggests that Fabregas pushed Vieira out of the way and into the team and that is only true in a sense, in my view. Vieira’s future was a separate question and he wanted to leave, I think, ideally, a midfield where Vieira could have sat alongside Fabregas would have been preferable.
Ultimately, I think it was Henry who moved aside to accommodate Fabregas as the ‘keys’ to the team were transferred. These aren’t insignificant players we are talking about, even if they were in their late 20s at the time. Fabregas came into the team at a historic high point. Dowman could potentially do the same.
That conversation will certainly hold for now; but this sort of talent doesn’t tend to preserve itself in amber for long. You accommodate good academy players and create pathways for them, talent of this level announces itself and you rearrange the furniture around it. Unless something unexpected happens, it feels like we are going to find out quite soon who ends up in the loft.
When a comparable talent like Jack Wilshere emerged, there wasn’t really a big player for him to ‘chin.’ Arsenal were in the middle of project youth and Wilshere was easily accommodated among a midfield of Diaby, Song, Denilson and Ramsey. Fabregas blasted his way into an historic team, but a team that was reaching the end of its orbit.
When Tony Adams emerged in the 1980s, he did so under George Graham who was looking to sweep aside some senior players in favour of younger, hungrier blood. Kenny Sansom was (and still is) a club legend, he also didn’t play in the same position as Adams per se. But Sansom was sold by Graham and his captain’s armband was given to Adams.
That was a significant scalp for a young defender to take and few would have predicted that Arsenal’s long-serving and well-loved left-back would fall victim to the new regime under Graham. Bukayo Saka’s talent meant that Arsenal initially made room for him as a left wing-back with Granit Xhaka guarding him in a similar way that David O’Leary did early in Adams’ career.
I have said many times before that I think moving Saka to the right was a logical decision based on where the most obvious gap in the team was. In an alternate universe, I think he could have been a left-winger or a more interior player. But in the 2020-21 ‘lockdown’ season when Saka first really played on the right, his competition were the failed signings of Nicolas Pepe and Willian.
What is really interesting in Dowman’s case is that none of these contexts apply. Arsenal are not in the middle of a rebuild, nor are they are a late prime team. They don’t need to lose big personalities due to a perceived lack of hunger. If anything, they are in the ripest state one could imagine in terms of age and what they are close to achieving.
Players like David Bentley and Jermaine Pennant did not succeed at Arsenal mainly due to attitude but, also, because they reached key development points during an absolute high point of Wenger’s Arsenal. It was difficult to get them into match day squads. Maybe in the current climate of bigger benches and multiple substitutions, they may have stood more of a chance.
For the time being, Dowman is operating in that context, where he can make the bench due to modern squad sizes. This is important because he is so young that going on loan is not really an option for him at the moment, but it is also clear that U21 football is already too easy for him.
I have been loathe to write about Dowman due to his age and because I am cognisant of applying pressure, but I think we’ve passed that stage now. He still has to develop, as a person as much as a player. We have also seen with Nwaneri that the trajectory can slow when opponents become more accustomed to your attributes and conjure up clearer ways to stop you.
Arsenal have a big enough squad and enough games and enough substitutions to perhaps make Dowman’s introduction slightly less dramatic than Fabregas’, for example. In Arsenal terms, I just don’t think I have seen a player of this age look this good before and I am pretty sure that talent that luminous will force the situation sooner rather than later.
