Arsenal: Forgotten Ainsley Maitland-Niles return too perfect to ignore

Arsenal youngster Ainsley Maitland-Niles has recently disappeared to a phantom injury, but now that he’s back, is the timing too perfect to ignore?

I have to admit, these past few weeks, I had completely forgotten about Ainsley Maitland-Niles. The young Englishman was having a real go at his first season as a regular presence in the Arsenal first team, so I’m a bit ashamed to admit that, but honestly, there are next to no reports about where Maitland-Niles has been since his last appearance (90 minutes against Watford) back on March 11th.

I had to dig into Twitter to discover that he had, in fact, been injured, and no one was talking about it. Which, on one hand, means that he wasn’t missed all that much but, on the other, now means that we have a fantastic resource at our disposal that we had essentially counted out.

Maitland-Niles was due back from his injury on April 12th, even though his injury wasn’t even listed on Arsenal.com.

Anyway, whatever the circumstances, the point now is that his return may be too perfectly timed to ignore. With Henrikh Mkhitaryan out for another couple of weeks, and midfielders suddenly stretched thin, the young Englishman may finally have his in to a true midfield opportunity.

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Ideally, I’d like to see Aaron Ramsey pushed forward into the attacking midfield and Mohamed Elneny come in alongside Granit Xhaka. But that’s in the Europa League. In the Premier League, we have a fantastic opportunity to allow Maitland-Niles to run with his desired role.

He has had just a couple of chances this year and none have been particularly convincing. But it’s a work in progress, as is Reiss Nelson, who landed his first start just last weekend.

Maitland-Niles is blocked from leftback with the return of Sead Kolasinac, which, again, may eve

n add to his favor of potentially moving into the midfield, where he feels he belongs.

We’ve chatted endlessly about what the Premier League amounts to now and the short answer is nothing. It’s nothing more than a testing ground. Maitland-Niles desperately needs some more testing because his initial prognosis was inconclusive. Positive at first, but it faded later on.

With all the summer signings likely to come in this summer and Henrikh Mkhitaryan coming back sooner than we expected, the window of opportunity is closing. There won’t be another time where the Gunners have disposable game time to just hand out.

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