Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka is reluctantly making a big impression at the back
When the time comes for Freddie Ljungberg to cast around for management roles, there is one piece of foresight he might want to drop into any job interviews. On a freezing December night in Liège, midway through his stint as Arsenal’s interim head coach, he opted to solve a personnel shortage by selecting Bukayo Saka, a gifted but seemingly raw wide forward, at left wing-back. Saka excelled in a dour performance that picked up when he delivered brilliantly for Alexandre Lacazette to score. Moments later the 18-year-old curled a marvellous equaliser and, at the time, such pearls of quality felt as much a rebuke to his manager as proof he had adapted seamlessly.
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“He was a bit upset with me because he had to play wing-back and full-back, and he doesn’t like it so much,” Ljungberg said, not that he looked remotely repentant. “But he’s a tremendous talent. His final ball is always effective and there’s always an end product to his work.”
A dozen appearances later, Saka is yet to return to his preferred – events have ensured one hesitates to say natural – position. Arsenal were not supposed to lack left-back options after signing Kieran Tierney from Celtic, and with Sead Kolasinac capable of foraging a tramline up and down that flank. But Tierney has been hampered by injury and three days after Saka’s display in Belgium Kolasinac pulled up against Manchester City. Ljungberg could have shuffled things around but decided Saka had shown enough nous to come straight on at left-back. The next week Mikel Arteta watched him complete 90 minutes there in a generally awful draw at Everton and Saka, who had experienced the position fleetingly with England Under-18s, has been impossible to dislodge ever since.
He seems certain to face Everton again on Sunday and his progress since that first encounter has, by any measure, been astonishing. Whether he likes it or not, Saka appears made for left-back and the figures are stacking up. The low centre that brought Lacazette’s winner at Olympiakos was his ninth assist of the season and his fifth in the Europa League. None of his teammates, nor his peers in the European competition, have achieved anything comparable. Five of those contributions have come since his deployment in the nominally more defensive role, the most memorable bringing an outrageous nutmeg of Valentino Lazaro before teeing up Nicolas Pépé in the demolition of Newcastle.
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Saka’s rare quality is that every action bursts with purpose and information. Little is wasted and that is something Arteta, keen for Arsenal’s improvement to be light on frills for now, values highly. Ljungberg’s comment about end product was not simply a rhapsody in the post-match glow: the clarity Saka shows in the final third, so acute for a player who turned 18 in September, arises constantly in conversation with anyone who has dealt with him during his journey through the ranks.
These are, Saka might protest, essential qualities in a winger but it is easy to see why Arteta might consider a longer-term conversion. He has largely played down the idea so far but that Arsène Wenger made successful winger-cum-defenders of Ashley Cole, Gaël Clichy and Kieran Gibbs will not be lost on the head coach. Arguably, none of them possessed Saka’s power or decisive streak at this age and it helps that things have gone well defensively too. Saka is tough in one-on-ones, knows when to snap into tackles and – another theme his coaches relish – is desperate to learn. “He’s always asking questions, meeting with my assistants and wanting to improve,” Arteta said. One possible weakness, which Olympiakos almost exposed, lurks in his awareness when defending the back post but issues of that kind can be smoothed with time.
So are Arsenal blessed with their next world-class full-back or is a major conundrum in the post? It is not fanciful to suggest that were an England squad picked on current form Saka and Leicester’s Ben Chilwell would be its left-backs. He could find himself an international player in his new role by accident but his talent as a winger, evidenced in the way he dismantled Eintracht Frankfurt in September, suggests he would eventually achieve the same via his favoured route too.
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After the Newcastle game he said he could not see himself becoming a left-back permanently. “I feel like my dream was always to be a winger, to affect games, score goals and get assists. For now I’ll do the job the manager asks me to do.”
He is ticking those boxes already but Saka, an intelligent individual who achieved As or A*s in all his GCSEs, will know he has only one career. There are already rumblings about his contract, a relatively meagre package that expires next summer and will need improving upon quickly.
Champions League clubs risk complicating the situation for Arsenal if the Gunners do not qualify and Saka will hope to discover the plan for more specific aspects of his longer-term development, too.
How to make the best of him is one of the happiest, but also among the riskiest, calls Arteta will have to make over the coming months; it is also one that those who raised eyebrows when handed the lineups in Liège could hardly have seen coming.
