Even an entertaining FA Cup weekend is still an FA Cup weekend, and that means stretches and reaches must be performed to make things interesting.
It might be pretending that Max Dowman is about to get a Walcottesque England call-up, or that Igor Tudor has been booting Spurs players out of training, or that literally anyone outside his immediate family cares about whether or not Luke Shaw is allowed to chop down a cherry tree.
What a Monday morning.
Max power
Don’t think we’re speaking out of turn in saying that Mirror man Andy Dunn might have got slightly overexcited by the sight of Max Dowman playing quite well in an unconvincing Arsenal victory against League One Mansfield in the FA Cup at the weekend.
Arsenal star Max Dowman will soon be a player Thomas Tuchel finds impossible to resist
Just in case you thought this might be a headline-writer stitch-up, don’t worry. It isn’t.
Watching Max Dowman tame a treacherous pitch and opposition in Mansfield, it was hard not to envisage him in a full England jersey.
With all due respect to Mansfield, they are Mansfield. Max Dowman is very obviously a prodigiously talented young footballer among a collection of prodigiously talented young footballers at Arsenal. But he is absolutely nowhere near the England squad. As even Dunn knows.
Probably not as soon as World Cup 2026, obviously. A teenage masterclass at the One Call Stadium is not enough to get the one call from Thomas Tuchel.
Not sure we need that ‘Probably’. Mediawatch will eat several of its large collection of hats if Max Dowman goes to the World Cup.
We’re not even sure about this bit.
Considering the demanding nature of Arsenal’s schedule over the next eleven weeks, Dowman could well play a significant part in the Gunners’ four-pronged challenge.
He is at best third-choice on the right wing for Arsenal. Does also feel like it’s potentially worth noting that both the men in front of him are very much in Thomas Tuchel’s England squads.
And having suggested the idea remains fairly preposterous, there remains time for Dowman to give Tuchel cause for some serious thought, even though the England manager has already warned of the dangers of putting too many demands on the Arsenal player.
You can’t just keep saying ‘It won’t happen, obviously, but also it might’. This is getting so weird now.
Sure enough, we now get to the inevitable.
But Dowman is clearly exceptional, in the same way Lamine Yamal was exceptional when he made his debut for Spain at the age of 16 years and 57 days.
Chucking Lamine Yamal’s name around in the very next paragraph after noting that Tuchel has ‘warned of the danger of putting too many demands on the Arsenal player’ is magnificent.
It’s also b*llocks. We mean this as no slight on Dowman, but he is no Lamine Yamal.
When Spain gave a 16-year-old Yamal his debut in September 2023 he had already broken through and established himself in the first month of the new season as a La Liga starter for Barcelona. In the season he made his Spain debut, he ended up with 37 La Liga appearances and 10 more in the Champions League.
Dowman has made two brief substitute appearances in the Premier League – a grand total of 29 minutes on the pitch – and one in the Champions League. That’s still extraordinary for a 16-year-old, and it would have been more but for injury, yet it also just highlights how much of an outlier Yamal actually is.
It’s entirely unhelpful to compare almost any other young player to Lamine Yamal, because almost no player in history has been Lamine Yamal at 16 years old.
Where comparisons do feel closer to the mark is where Dunn chooses to start his pitch. But that’s not really a good thing.
Almost 20 years ago, Sven-Göran Eriksson made a World Cup selection so left-field that the player himself thought it was a practical joke. Theo Walcott was actually taking the theory section of his driving test when his name appeared on Eriksson’s list and refused to believe it when his dad told him the news.
Were we about to spend several hundred words arguing for the possible World Cup selection of an entirely untested, unproven teenager from Arsenal over multiple currently superior and more seasoned contenders, we’d probably accept that we had to mention Theo Walcott at some point but we think we’d try not to lean so heavily from the outset on such a similar gamble that proved so utterly pointless.
Dowman has at least played for Arsenal, but the fact an England manager made what remains an inexplicable choice 20 years ago absolutely doesn’t mean another should do it now. The opposite, if anything.
When Walcott made his international debut – before his Arsenal debut – in a friendly against Hungary in May, 2006, he became the youngest player in England history.
That mark of 17 years and 75 days still stands. Dowman will almost certainly not get the type of shock call-up that Walcott got, but he will surely be breaking his record before the year is out.
Mediawatch is sat here scratching its head at where precisely Dunn thinks the certainty and doubt lie in these projections.
Five will make you go down
The Tottenham Crisis has become a fascinating case study for Mediawatch. Because what it’s revealed is that there is absolutely nothing real that is sufficiently bad for the tabloids not to feel they need to add a dose of sh*thouse mischief on top.
Here you have a Premier League Big Six team that is currently the worst in the Premier League and, barring a dramatic change in their own form and that of teams around them, heading for relegation.
Tottenham going down is now enormously likely and would be the most absurd Premier League event since Leicester winning the league; there is absolutely no need to over-egg a pudding that already contains such vast quantity of egg.
It is almost impossible to overstate how bad Spurs are, or how bad their transfer business and managerial decisions over recent years, or even how the scale of the shambles off the field matches that on the field.
Things really are very, very bad indeed at Spurs in almost every conceivable way. And yet the tabloids just can’t help themselves.
Last week we had revelations about Brennan Johnson’s rule-breaking before his Tottenham exit, which turned out to be a) stupid fake Australian rules that aren’t real and b) 18 months before his exit.
Now thanks to the Express we have this.
Igor Tudor kicked five players out of training as Tottenham concerns grow
Now we know and you know that the presence of the ‘as’ there already tells us something is afoot, but there really is only one fair and reasonable interpretation of that collection of words: that Igor Tudor has kicked five players out of Tottenham training.
Obviously, that’s not it at all.
Tottenham Hotspur manager Igor Tudor encountered turmoil and squad discord at previous club Marseille that resulted in five players being expelled from training.
Sake. This made us laugh, though.
The Croatian has been defeated in all three of his fixtures at the helm thus far and his nightmarish stint somewhat mirrors the ill-fated period he experienced in France between 2022 and 2023.
Does it?
Despite guiding Marseille to third place in Ligue 1…
That’ll be a no, then.
Cherry joke
It’s only been a couple of weeks since we had to remind The Sun that a story only really qualifies as an EXCLUSIVE if you’ve beaten everyone else to get a story they all wanted. Being the only ones who have it because nobody else is bothered doesn’t really count.
Yet we must once again tap the sign after today’s Currant Bun brings us this scoop.
Manchester United defender Luke Shaw has been given the go-ahead to chop down a “dangerous” cherry tree at his £5million Cheshire mansion.
There are simply not enough Partridge shrug gifs in the world.
