Arsenal vs Newcastle: Ainsley Maitland-Niles looking for big step

Arsenal aren’t likely to change much going into the Newcastle match, and that means that Ainsley Maitland-Niles will have a chance to take a big step forward.

Unai Emery’s reliance on the 3-5-2 has been a pleasant surprise lately. It goes against a lot of the things he had previously been setting up for Arsenal. It hasn’t included any defensive midfielders, it’s been a back three, a one-man creative midfield, and two strikers. All things that, at the start of the year, didn’t look like reliable things.

But in came the wingbacks to win the day. Sead Kolasinac has been winning the day all year with his marauding runs and sizzling crosses from wide. I swear, as soon as either Alexandre Lacazette and/or Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang get on the same wavelength, that’s going to be a treasure trove of goals until opposing defenses can figure it out.

The problem has been that Kolasinac didn’t have anyone opposite him to provide the same and thus further justify use of wingbacks, but now that Ainsley Maitland-Niles has been on the case, everything has changed for the better.

Maitland-Niles has been the perfect foil to Kolasinac, such that he’s even forced the Bosnian into the shadows by going above and beyond in these past couple of matches, both of which earned him man of the match.

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He’s been unstoppable, and you can never say too much about how valuable it is to have two equal and opposite weapons on either side of the pitch because they stretch that defense to its maximum width.

Against Newcastle, Maitland-Niles has the chance to make that all-important step into a third straight great game. I got similarly hyped when Henrikh Mkhitaryan did it (he ended up making it four) and for just cause. Maitland-Niles, like Mkhitaryan, is a player with tons of natural ability, but he hasn’t had the consistency. Though, unlike Mkhitaryan, that has mostly come down to the fact that he couldn’t stay healthy and/or couldn’t stay in one position. he kept getting hurt and moved around, leaving very little opportunity for consistency.

If he puts in a shift against Newcastle and shows yet again that he can be counted on to be the counterweight to Kolasinac, than you really do have to start considering this set-up to be a real solution.

We’ve always known that Maitland-Niles had some specialty to him, it’s nice to see him finally staking his claim to an actual position, and not just as a utility man.