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A lot of people don’t like Myles Lewis-Skelly - but whether it’s his England call-up or his NXGN ranking, he’s earning his respect.
Goal have just released their latest NXGN list – a countdown of their 50 top talents born after 1 January 2006 which is among the most influential and widely-read lists of its type in the world. This year’s edition also just so happens to have two Arsenal players in the top 10.
Few fans seem to be taking issue with Ethan Nwaneri’s inclusion at #6 (Lamine Yamal was given top spot, unsurprisingly) if only because even rival fans can begrudgingly tell that Nwaneri is cut from a special kind of cloth – but the presence of Myles Lewis-Skelly (#8) seems to be ruffling a few feathers, not that it has much to do with the soon-to-be England international’s level of talent.
Should you be one of the many people who go through their lives blissfully unaware of the latest bickering on social media, there are a lot of people who have taken a disliking the young left-back, largely spurred on by his perceived ‘arrogance’ after he sent up Erling Haaland having scored against Manchester City in the 5-1 win at the Emirates in early February. It’s an incredibly petty reason to diminish a remarkable talent.
Lewis-Skelly is no more confident than he should be
There has always been a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and it’s one easily blurred by our biases – no doubt Manchester City fans are far more likely to detect arrogance in Lewis-Skelly after the Arsenal man adopted the lotus position shortly after cracking Arsenal’s third goal in on that one-sided Sunday afternoon.
It was such a mild send-up that the reaction, which has taken it as a dire insult against one of the Premier League’s best players (who deserves more respect and all that), seems less than proportionate, especially given that Haaland had reportedly screamed “who the f**k are you?” at Lewis-Skelly during a minor scuffle towards the end of the 2-2 draw between the two clubs in September.
Clearly, Lewis-Skelly hadn’t forgotten being angrily dismissed by Haaland, and had every right to bite back – it’s just that his means of doing so was rather wittier and a little bit more memorable. The result is that a great many fans have taken against him just 14 Premier League appearances into his career.
While some are just riled up by old-fashioned tribalism, of course, others are piling on in part because every single topic of conversation that crops up on social media simply has to become a trenchant two-sided war of words – and in part, sadly, because Lewis-Skelly is Black.
Yes, we know, you don’t dislike him because of the colour of his skin, that’s absurd etc etc… nobody is claiming that it’s a conscious bias. But it’s almost always young Black people who get that kind of opprobrium for being too arrogant, too cocky, too disrespectful, too this, too that.
Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto, as Samuel L Jackson put it during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl half-time show, one week after Lewis-Skelly had stuck himself in the social media firing line for daring to have a little fun at his opponent’s expense. A lot of people who watched that performance didn’t really take the hint. Isn’t ironic that some people want him to stay humble?
In any case, whether you call it confidence or cockiness, whether you like him or dislike him… he’s also earned the right to a high opinion of himself, if he has one. There’s a reason he’s Arsenal’s starting left-back, a reason he’s set to make his England debut already, a reason he’s in the upper echelons of the NXGN rankings. He’s really rather good.
Why Lewis-Skelly deserves his NXGN place and his England call-up
The surface glance at Lewis-Skelly’s stats doesn’t really tell you the full truth about why he’s such a special talent – and the two red cards he’s already picked up in his young career bely the maturity of his play.
Lewis-Skelly doesn’t do anything in great volume. He doesn’t make vast numbers of passes, doesn’t make a ton of tackles, doesn’t take his man on all that often… but what he does do is make the right decision a remarkably high percentage of the time.
He may not make as many passes as some full-backs, but his accuracy (91.1%) is high and around 10% of all his passes are ‘progressive passes’, the short explanation for which is that they’re passes that advance play at least 10 yards into the opposing half or into their penalty area. Basically, he makes a lot of good, high-impact passes.
He doesn’t rack up vast numbers of tackles or turnovers, but he has succeeded with every single attempted tackle he has made in the Premier League this season (slight asterisk coming up on that stat shortly) and has won 75% of his one-on-one ground duels – only Aston Villa’s Ezri Konsa has a better success rate in that department in the entire top flight.
And he may not take a defender on very often, but his 62% win rate is good. Really, the only deficiency in his game is that he doesn’t create as many shooting chances as he could given that he gets into a healthy number of promising, advanced positions, but for an 18-year-old in his first senior season to have just one area of his game in need of significant improvement is quite something.
Sure, he has two red cards – one a refereeing mistake which turned into another tedious VAR controversy, the other a slightly clumsy challenge on Mohammed Kudus which was deemed to have denied a goal-scoring opportunity despite being on the half-way line. The stats don’t count that as a failed tackle, which it effectively was, but given the situation it was a challenge he probably had to make to prevent a goal but which he could reasonably have thought would not result in a red had he got it wrong.
The sendings-off (one understandable and one an officiating error) combined with his alleged ‘attitude’ (spare us) have left a false impression on some people that he is immature. Perhaps, off the pitch, he is – who knows or really cares? – but on the field his decision-making is astonishingly sound for someone so young. Besides, he only commits one foul every other game. That includes the red cards. Discipline is hardly an issue.
Perhaps Lewis-Skelly won’t live up to his early hype. Maybe he won’t be England’s left-back for years to come, or at least have a cracking battle for the job with Lewis Hall. Sometimes talents don’t turn out to be first-rate players – but one of the toughest bridges for young players to cross is learning how to make the right decisions with the ball at their feet or when they’re tracking back with a world-class winger running right at them. The difference between Lewis-Skelly and most players of a similar age is that he seems to be over that bridge already.
Lewis-Skelly deserves to be recognised as one of the world’s top young talents, because he is. He deserves an England cap, because he’s one of the best options in his position, especially with more experienced players out through injury. He also deserves not to be given quite so much grief just because he’s a teenager who took the mick out of a rival player.
Related topics:ArsenalErling Haaland
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