Mikel Arteta has spoken about the need for “caution” and “care” with Max Dowman as the 15-year-old could get more first-team minutes when Arsenal face Port Vale in the League Cup on Wednesday.
Dowman made his Premier League debut in August aged 15 years and 235 days and has been around the first team since last season. He travelled with the senior side on their mid-season trip to Dubai and was involved in four of their five pre-season friendlies this summer.
Those appearances came on the right wing, where Arsenal have now lost Noni Madueke for around two months, potentially opening a space for the teenager to fill.
Asked how to build up Dowman’s development at such a young age, head coach Arteta said: “Preparing a very good understanding of his new situation and all the things that are different in his life.
“We need to change his times, his education, his allocation, where he is with his family. His diet is different, his sleep pattern is different, the training load is different. The amount of information, pressure and exposure is different, so we have to manage a lot of factors.
“When you add a lot of minutes with different teams, we need to be cautious and very careful. That’s what we are trying to do to find that balance to keep Max as connected as possible to the first team, but we need the right mixture of minutes like the other day with the Under-21s.”
Dowman was not included in Arsenal’s matchday squad against Manchester City at the weekend and instead played 74 minutes of the Under-21s’ 3-2 win over Wolves, scoring their second goal.
In September’s international break, he was fouled at least nine times in England Under-19s’ game against Spain, with left-back Davinchi taken off before he could be shown a second yellow card. This treatment is not new to Dowman, and Arteta admitted it also happened in a more light-hearted fashion when he first joined first-team training.
“At the beginning, they immediately kicked him,” he joked on how first-team members took to being nutmegged by someone so young. “Max, to be fair, was excellent. He stood up and got into the next one.
“You can really take it personally, someone who was 14 last year, doing certain things to players. Everybody loves him. You just want to hug him and help him.”
Arteta also gave fitness updates for captain Martin Odegaard, Kai Havertz and Piero Hincapie.
“No surgery (for Odegaard),” he said. “He’s totally fine. He’s already been training and it will be a matter of days, I think.
“With Kai, we know that it will be months with him. You never know because this is Kai and he’s a different specimen. He’s progressing and we really miss him.
“(Hincapie) picked up a little groin injury. We have to again assess him in the next few days on how he goes. There’s been a change of load and he didn’t really have a pre-season after the injury. I think it will be short-term.”
(Photo: Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)
