Arsenal vs Burnley: Nicolas Pepe probably isn’t going to start

More and more weapons are arriving in the match fitness category for Arsenal, so going up against Burnley, why wouldn’t Nicolas Pep be starting?

Arsenal broke a club record bringing in Nicolas Pepe. It was such an enormous fee that they have to pay it off in installments, as they didn’t have all the funds at the time to pay it all off immediately.

Naturally, when you spend that much on a player, you want an immediate impact, but Nicolas Pepe’s involvement in the African Cup of Nations prevented him from being at full match fitness, and he made only a brief cameo against Newcastle.

While I would love to sit here and say we should expect something different against Burnley, and that we should expect Pepe to be in the starting XI, I have to be the bearer of bad news. Or… the bearer of a bad hypothesis.

Knowing how Unai Emery operates, I would actually be surprised to see Nicolas Pepe in the Arsenal starting XI. Not at any fault of his own, but because, even last year, when Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang were dying to play together, Emery avoided it.

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He didn’t want to play all his cards at once. He was still experimenting. But once he unleashed them, he really unleashed them.

Pepe could fall into a similar situation, where Emery doesn’t feel the need to rush him, as well he shouldn’t, and thus he takes his time working him into the starting XI. And it’s not even like we can fault hi, for that. What’s the rush, other than for the fans’ enjoyment?

Then there’s the matter of Reiss Nelson. While Nelson figures to take a backseat to Pepe at some point, it wouldn’t be very Emery-like to deny Nelson the chance to prove himself while Pepe settles in, and perhaps even after that. Maybe this is Nelson’s job to lose. Emery has a fierce streak for justice, and that doesn’t involve benching a youngster after one week just because the shiny new signing might be better.

Emery said he was taking it slow with Pepe. That doesn’t mean one week and balls to the wall. It means slow. Maybe he plays for 30 minutes against Burnley, if necessary. But Pepe needs to settle in too and, in the meantime, we have Reiss Nelson to be excited about.

But again, this is yet another situation where I would love to be proven wrong.