Max Dowman became the youngest player to be sent off in a League Cup match at 16 years and 300 days, dismissed late in Arsenal’s Carabao Cup tie at Fleetwood — a match the League Two hosts, 84 places below Arsenal in the pyramid, went on to win on penalties.
The offence came after an overaggressive sliding tackle from Fleetwood’s Harrison Neal. Dowman reacted by lifting his right knee towards the defender, and referee Michael Salisbury showed him a straight red card. Arsenal intend to appeal against the dismissal.
Mikel Arteta’s response was immediate and visible. Standing with his arms folded across his chest, the Arsenal manager leaned towards Dowman and aimed a few words at the teenager as he trudged towards the touchline before heading down the tunnel. What was said has not been disclosed, though that has not stopped speculation on social media. Arteta told Sky after the defeat that he wanted to watch the incident again before “assessing the situation”, but he made no excuses for his player in his post-match press conference. “It was something that we discussed before the game,” he said of the touchline exchange. “We knew when we prepared the context of the match, we were very clear on the things to expect, the things that emotionally we have to dominate.”
Whether the reaction merited a straight red is open to debate. There was minimal force in the lift of the knee, and Salisbury could easily have chosen to book both players and defuse the situation — particularly given that Cole Palmer was booked rather than dismissed for barging into Tottenham’s Matheus Fernandes off the ball on Saturday, an act that appeared considerably more aggressive. But acts of petulance have rarely been tolerated by officials, as Wayne Rooney and David Beckham famously discovered while playing for England at World Cups. Dowman was judged to have overstepped the line.
It is a pressure Arteta has warned the record-breaking teenager he would have to handle as his reputation has grown. Only last month Dowman was sent off playing for England Under-19s against the USA after a poorly timed tackle that most present at the behind-closed-doors fixture considered a harsh decision, in a match where he was said to have been on the receiving end of a host of strong challenges. Last year Arteta urged Dowman to follow Bukayo Saka’s example after revealing the youngster had been fouled nine times in the first half of an England Under-19s game against Spain. “It’s going to happen, he’s going to have to learn when to release the ball and when to attract his starting position,” Arteta said then. “Very similar to Bukayo in the beginning as well. Those players are going to attract players, contact, attention and they have to be very smart about when you want that contact and when you don’t want it, and what you have to do to avoid it.” Asked how Dowman tends to react, he added: “He just gets up … very rare! Sometimes I get surprised emotionally how cool he can be. I think it’s about repetition. He’s so used to it that now he knows to let the referee deal with it and my teammates probably to defend me, and I will carry on playing.”
Once the dust settles on a defeat that ranks alongside Arsenal’s League Cup upsets against Swindon, Birmingham and Bradford, Arteta may come to regret admonishing a 16-year-old so publicly. Paul Merson criticised the manager’s actions and questioned whether he would “do it differently” given another chance. Part of Arteta’s frustration, though, will be that Dowman took the bait — and he knows opponents will now target the teenager even more deliberately to see whether they can provoke another reaction.
If the appeal fails, Dowman faces a three-match domestic suspension, ruling him out of Sunday’s trip to Liverpool and the subsequent games against Hull and Newcastle. The timing is unhelpful for Arsenal: Saka’s thigh injury is expected to keep him out for several weeks and had opened the possibility of more Premier League minutes for Dowman, while Noni Madueke did not travel to Fleetwood because of an ankle issue.
Dowman’s rise has been rapid. He became the first 15-year-old to play in the Champions League, then broke the Premier League’s youngest goalscorer record against Everton in March, and he scored twice against Ipswich in the previous round of the Carabao Cup last month. He has trained with the first team since the age of 14, and Arsenal have been careful not to overexpose one of the most talked-about products of their Hale End academy. This is the first major setback of his fledgling career, and the challenge now is how he responds to the extra scrutiny — on and off the pitch — that is certain to follow.