Arsenal 2-0 Everton
by Layth Yousif
at Ashburton Grove

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Max Dowman is too young to vote, drive or get a legal tattoo. But he’s old enough to change a game, and perhaps alter the course of a season for Arsenal, his Premier League title-chasing club.

The clock ticked towards 7pm on a Saturday night in Islington, north London. A nervy, fraught football match was still in the balance, as the majority in the crowd of more than 60,000 shifted towards a state of unbearable tension. 

The scoreline was goalless at 74 minutes against Everton. Needing a win and the desperately required three points that came with it, Mikel Arteta’s table-topping Gunners were struggling to break down their opponents, who were organised, hard-working and fiendishly difficult to score against. 

David Moyes’s functional side hadn’t lost an away game since December 13. You could see why. 

So much has been written and said about Arsenal boss Arteta, and his side this season. Not many consistently victorious teams have had to deal with such criticism, sniping, jealousy, fear and, yes, hatred, as Arteta and his squad have had to endure during this campaign. Boring, tedious and tiresome are some of the refrains from hysterical non-believers, digs aimed at unsettling the Basque-born manager, amid the Gunners’ reliance on blasting rivals away with the chaos created from set-piece situations. 

However, across all the noise, Arteta can never be labelled as a gambler, or a risk-taker. Assiduous, valuing industriousness over flair at times, yes. Invariably careful, and cautious, of course. But never a speculator. 

Yet, with 16 minutes remaining of this match against seemingly unbreakable and unbeatable Everton, as a cold darkness fell after a pleasant early spring afternoon in the capital, Arteta thought nothing of enacting a substitution that will go down in the history of this grand club. 

A remarkable switch that saw the San Sebastian-born boss haul off his metronomic midfielder and fellow Basque Martin Zubimendi, who hails from the same beautiful town on the coast. A vital anchor to this Gunners team, a conduit for prompting attacks, and denying and repelling counters, a European Championship winner with the relentlessly all-conquering Spanish national side. 

Who came on in Zubimendi’s place at such an important juncture? A teenager aged 16 years and 73 days. 

A youngster who had made two previous Premier League appearances as a substitute, with the match against Everton, now being Dowman’s third.

To look at Arteta’s body language was to give a clue. This soon-to-be-game-changing decision wasn’t a risk at all. It seemed to be the most natural thing in the world to throw in a seemingly callow lad, who hasn’t even taken his GCSEs yet, let alone is allowed to change in the same dressing room as adults.

This observer recalls being present at an Arteta press conference last season, when the boss, unprompted, informed us assembled hacks present that if the rules allowed it — they didn’t — he would have played the then 14-year-old Dowman in a Champions League game. Not a dead rubber, you understand, but a vital knockout clash. 

The Premier League is full of hyperbole, but Arteta is not. 

For those of us lucky to have seen the continued upward trajectory of a precocious talent over the last 12 months, including numerous visits to study the club’s U21 academy side in action, which included witnessing a delicious solo goal by Dowman against the mighty Bayern Munich U21s last November, in a finish that was as much about composure, as the magic Arteta and his compatriots would call “illusion,” the prodigy was ready for Moyes’s men. 

Just as the same Moyes thrust the then 16-year-old Wayne Rooney against Arsenal at Goodison Park back in 2002, the goal he scored that day changing his life forever, so Dowman would mirror such history.

After entering the fray, Arteta’s substitute urgently enlivened matters. A keenness — no, a demand — to be given the ball and run at the now concerned but still in command Everton back line was evident.

Immediately, the lithe Dowman, mop-haired, impish, and creative, sent a frisson through the crowd.

Where apprehension had been building, now there was hope and excitement. 

To look upon such balance, such poise, such grace, such supine confidence in a footballer is rare. To view such qualities in a 16-year-old is preposterous. But then Dowman is no average Joe. Dowman doesn’t walk, he glides. Lightly treading the turf, shifting position and angles, twisting and turning, all the while, head up of course, scanning not the next move, but like the finest chess players, computing the next three or four future moves. 

As the clock ticked down, the teenager — who isn’t even allowed to buy a cinema ticket to a film rated 18, for heaven’s sake — ran at the Everton defence, causing havoc. Not least with their psyche. 

Like the late, great leg-spin magician Shane Warne, bamboozling opponents by implanting the psychology of fear, Dowman had created doubt in Toffees’ minds. 

A youngster who had made two previous Premier League appearances as a substitute, with the match against Everton, now being Dowman’s third.

As we entered the 89th minute, still goalless, Dowman picked up the ball from a throw-in on the right and curled in a tantalising cross. A ball into respected England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford’s box, who then made an error of judgement. 

The keeper, on his 350th appearance for Everton no less, was so scrambled by Dowman, he inexplicably clawed at the cross, directing it to Piero Hincapie, lurking nearby. The ball struck the Ecuadorian’s midriff, before heading along the line, and the direction of the club’s yeoman Swedish striker, Viktor Gyokeres, who made no mistake from two yards out to make it 1-0 to the Arsenal.

Never will Gyokeres have such an easy finish as the stadium erupted in celebration.

Now, finally behind, in a bid to rescue a point they thought was theirs, Moyes’s Everton broke their match-long habit and decided to open up and attack. 

In the 97th minute of the 96 decreed by the officials, the visitors from Merseyside won a corner. Pickford was granted permission to venture forward into his opponent’s box.

The corner taken, Gabi Martinelli duly won a header, leaving Pickford stranded in utterly the wrong territory, as Dowman picked up the ball on the edge of his own box. 

What followed has already entered wondrous lore among Gooners everywhere — and will be spoken about with reverence and awe as long as this great club exists, especially among those lucky enough to have witnessed the event in person.

Taking the ball in his stride, Dowman dropped his shoulder to fend off the attentions of Vitali Mykolenko around the halfway line, as the unguarded opposition net opened up in front of him. There was still work to do as the Toffees chased back, desperately attempting to curtail his progress, with a foul if necessary. 

Dowman exhibited superb technique, not to mention composure, to push the ball further away from his pursuers with a perfectly cushioned touch, which, aided by Martinelli’s clever, if unsung legal blocking of the onrushing Mykolenko, left Dowman to pass the ball into an empty net, to make it 2-0, in what could be a decisively pivotal moment in the title race. 

The entire bench ran 50 yards to join in the fun with their teammates, along with raucously deep, joyous celebrations from the stands. 

Speaking afterwards a delighted Arteta said: “It was amazing, it was one of those moments that I think we’re going to remember for a long, long time.”

“I really enjoyed the relentless desire of the team, action by action, to put everything that we had in to earn the right to win the game. The manner in which it happened in the last few minutes, all the celebration, the atmosphere, the energy, the goal from Max, it made it such a special night.

“For many years, we will remember that we were there that night when that 16-year-old kid scored in such an important game when we were trying to win the title.”