Don’t expect miracles, but playing Nwaneri at just 15 was no ego trip

ARSENAL have been the surprise package of the season – and the biggest surprise was the debut of 15-year-old Ethan Nwaneri.

But don’t fall for any loose talk about Mikel Arteta giving a young kid a taste of firstteam action as an ego trip.

If you turn a 15-year-old boy’s career into a vanity project, just for the sake of the record books, you are potentially setting him back years.

I thought Nwaneri did fine and put himself about well during his cameo, with Arsenal fans chanting: “He’s got school in the morning.”

But social media ‘experts’ and pundits who speculate that Arteta’s eye-catching substitution was an ego trip are playing with fire.

Managers don’t chuck schoolboys into the heat of a Premier League game on a whim. You have to be sure the boy is physically ready to cope with the demands.

And you also have to be convinced it will not damage the youngster’s character off the pitch. As well as the rough and tumble, you have to safeguard his mental well-being.

Football is littered with cautionary tales of the next boy wonder, and all too often they sink without trace.

It’s so important to look after young lads whose physique and skill-sets look equipped for firstteam football. If you throw them in, just to make a statement like: ‘Look at our academy,

aren’t w e doing well,’ you can ruin a youngster’s prospects.

If he makes a mistake leading to a goal, how on earth do you repair his confidence?

You have to be 100 percent certain in his mental strength and his capacity to handle things. The pressures here at Macclesfield are different, but last season we gave nine Under-16 players their debut at senior level.

That comes with a huge responsibility because you hear of stories elsewhere that kids given a chance in the first team think they have

made

it, and their parents think they have cracked the big time.

When they go back to youth-team football, it feels like an anti-climax and you have to be careful not to disrupt the family unit, not just the teenage prospect.

Arsenal have made a fantastic start with six wins from their opening seven Premier League fixtures and, if they are going to mount

a sustained title challenge, their first in a long, long time, it will mean one of the big guns – and Liverpool have been the most disappointing so far – is going to miss out on the top four this season.

The way the Gunners went to Brentford last weekend and dominated a fixture in which they came horribly unstuck on the opening night of last season bodes very well for Arteta.

But straight after the international break it’s the white-hot atmosphere of the north London derby against bitter rivals Tottenham.

And, with all due respect, I don’t expect to see Ethan Nwaneri involved in a game of such animosity.

MOST refreshing team in the Premier League so far? Take a bow, Fulham.

From the first minute of the season, when they got stuck into Liverpool, Marco Silva’s side have been dynamic and enterprising.

There’s a long way to go, but I have been mightily

impressed so far.