Arsenal: Calum Chambers return an unsung milestone for club

Arsenal will finally, at long last, be welcome back Calum Chambers and while not much is being said about it, this return is huge for the club.

Arsenal invested a lot of time, money and effort into Calum Chambers. He was purchased for £16, from Southampton in 2014 and after a season of being played out of position, he fell out of favor and ended up on loan at Middlesbrough, where he anchored a surprisingly stout defense against constant siege.

Then, this past summer, Chambers was retained against all bids, as Wenger maintained that the young Englishman would not be sold for less than his asking price, was was supposedly in the mid-to-high £20m range.

An increase over what the Gunners paid for him.

Injury has kept Chambers out of the first team picture thus far into the season, but now that he has returned to health and, at Wenger’s own admission, you should be excited. And while there may be no great pomp and circumstance regarding his return, there should be. Because Chambers is still the massively talented lad we spent gobs of money on as a teenager.

Ever since his highly successful loan with Boro, the anticipation of his return should have been building. When Gabriel Paulista was sold, that should have built even more. Chambers has fantastic defensive instincts that always have me hearkening back to his emergency substitute appearance against Leicester in 2015/16 when he stone-walled Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy on two separate one-on-one clashes.

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That is a defender who doesn’t get turned around by hocus pocus footwork.

Arsenal’s defense started the year shaky but has proceeded to turn out two consecutive clean sheets. The likelihood of Chambers upsetting that back three is slim to none, but one bad performance or one injury opens up a door for Chambers to out-Holding Rob Holding’s 2016/17 emergence, where he seemed to put Chambers out of commission wit his own dominance.

Due take care to remember that Chambers was the original John Stones. A hyped Englishman that was the future of the national team’s back line. The only thing that got in the way of that was a lack of proper usage.

Now that he is back and, ideally, starting in the secondary competitions, he has a stage to assert himself in his rightful position and, in the process, we should start to see yet again why it was so important to retain his services.

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Given his fresh return, he may not start against Doncaster, but whenever he does make that starting return, watch for greatness, because that is what is waiting to burst out of the Englishman.

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