The rise of Saka through Arsenal's academy, told by those who helped him through it...
“As fantastic as he is in possession and with the ball, even in a team like Arsenal that likes to dominate possession, even if you’ve got 70 per cent possession, you know what you’re doing for the other 30 per cent of the time when you haven’t got it. So we made a conscious effort to play him in different positions. He learned the defensive side of the game, the importance of blocking, tracking, intercepting, the positioning and just even his mentality towards that.
All the while, Arsenal were developing this talent who looked just as able in forward positions or further back. It was interesting. They were not sure where he might end up, even if they were hopeful he had all the attributes to make a position in the first team his own. “Often young players will come up to Colney and train a little bit with the reserves or 21s, and maybe with the first team, and they they’re in and out quite a lot as they develop and learn to cope with the speed and tempo of first-team training. But Bukayo adapted really quickly and when he went up he didn’t really come back again.”Premier League
It was there, from nine years old and all the way through. Lincoln recently went back to revisit some of his player reviews from Saka’s younger years. “If you look back, what you see now is what you saw all along.”
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