“With all due respect to Bukayo Saka because even if he comes back from injury…” Arsenal player Declan Rice made a huge Bukayo Saka claim over another Arsenal star
Declan Rice hailed the impact of teenage star Ethan Nwaneri on another historic Champions League night for the Arsenal star.
The Gunners are virtually guaranteed to feature in the quarter finals of Europe’s elite club competition for a second consecutive season after an astonishing 7-1 win over PSV Eindhoven last night.
Mikel Arteta’s side arrived in Holland having failed to score in each of their last two games and were wondering where their next goal might come from given the number of attacking players they are still missing.
Arsenal needn’t have worried, however, as the home side’s generous defending offered them an opportunity to restore the sort of confidence and cohesion that has been sorely lacking in recent weeks.
Nwaneri was to the fore again, scoring his side’s second goal before creating the fourth for Martin Odegaard which settled the content immediately after the half-time break.
In registering his second Champions League goal of his breakthrough campaign, Nwaneri joined an elite group by becoming only the fourth player to score in the knockout stage of the competition before turning 18.
The Hale End Academy graduate has become an integral part of Arteta’s team in recent weeks, flourishing in the absence of Bukayo Saka who is still recovering from hamstring surgery
Saka is hopeful of making his long-awaited return after the upcoming international break, but Rice insists Nwaneri would still be featuring regularly regardless of his England teammate’s fitness.
‘Top, he’s 17-years-old and playing on the biggest stage in football, it’s crazy,’ Rice told TNT Sports after the game.
‘We see him every day in training. All of the lads have taken him under our wings, same with Myles and they deserve to be playing.
‘You should see them train they way they have no fear, they want to come and perform he was brilliant tonight.
‘Listen, even if Saks was still here Ethan would still be in and around the team and getting minutes because trust me he trains that well and he’s that good.
‘He’s with us, same with Myles even though he came off due to the yellow card we have two youngsters and we have plenty more coming through who are so, so good as well.’
There is unlikely to be any letup for Nwaneri, who will almost certainly start against Manchester United on Sunday and Arteta warned the challenge now for the 17-year-old is to deliver on a consistent basis.
He said: ‘I don’t think that he needs any pushing! You see him every time he has the ball what the intention is, so if he comes, he comes, and it’s great and really impressive again the way he behaved, the way he played tonight
‘It’s about consistency now, doing it again three days later in another big stadium.’
He added: ‘That’s what we want (to push on), but at the end, it’s a thing of execution.
‘Today we were exceptional – we talked before the game, boxes in the Champions League are critical, you have to dominate them.
‘If we hadn’t done it in the first action, they would have scored a goal, and then the other one was a penalty, but we were phenomenal today. Willingness is for sure going to be there, execution is something else.’