The Fawn and the Gabber Raver Driving Arsenal Into a Strange New Future

Fletcher. Drinkwater. Atkins, Mark Atkins. The thing about any title-winning English side is that it must absolutely be powered by a dominant central midfield; two or three furious, clanking human pistons that shovel and move and work; players who, in the Premier League's Mariana-Trench-deep late-December clinches, can emerge victorious not just through technical fleet-of-foot or sheer concussive force, but some other, higher sense of purpose, a divine angle on God that no other paparazzo has the good-fortune or nous to snare.

Of all the tangled narrative threads being seized upon this early Premier League season, it is this question of the engine room that feels the most intriguing and weirdly neglected – everywhere, that is, other than at Arsenal. A slightly alarming photo emerged this week of the North London side's two new central midfield recruits training in tandem. The costliest of these is the £26 million Uruguayan ratter Lucas Torreira, a 5'6" hardman who tackles with his head and who looks, despite his Valley Girl braces, at least one decade older than his purported 22 years, sharing with Wolves' haggard 21-year-old Rúben Neves the air of one of those storied Medieval boy-kings who manages to lead an army of thousands into battle, kill seven wives and die of gout all before he's old enough to buy cigs from Sainsbury's. At the World Cup, Torreira was a gabber rave of defensive acumen, pairing immaculate positioning with quick feet, an eye for a pass and dogged strength in the tackle – everything, in short, that for so long Arsenal have so desperately appeared to need.

"Need", though… it can be such a dull and uninspiring word, can't it? Deep down, do Arsenal fans really want what they need, or do they instead want what they want, what – in the humid, scented pages of their late-night crush-journals – they will admit they've always truly wanted: a precocious, unreliable, teenage French playmaker with silly hair, signed from Ligue 2 and thrust immediately into the cruel, wet glare of the planet's most helter-skelter, high-intensity footballing panopticon?

The answer to that question appears to be Mattéo Guendouzi, the 19-year-old lifted from Lorient for £8 million who is being touted by some fans as a saviour, the next Pirlo and Petit combined, the man to lead Arsenal into a gilded new era, after just one competitive game. For all that, the hysteria's not impossible to understand – even in pre-season Guendouzi emitted that rare charismatic glow that surrounds break-out footballing figures at the start of their careers, the ones you only need to watch for five minutes to know they'll be loitering somewhere in your peripheral vision for the next half-decade at least. Yes, he was culpable for at least one of Manchester City's goals on his debut and should've gifted them a third with an atrocious wafted mis-kick that allowed Sergio Aguero a free run at Petr Cech from the halfway line. But his defensive numbers – 90 minutes, four tackles, four interceptions – were generally good, although most impressive were the incessant demands for the ball, his presence and eagerness even at this embryonic stage to be the team's conductor.

"Each time he is tested at the upper level, at U16, U17, U19, each time it took him only a few times to become the boss of the team," Lorient president Loic Ferry told the Independent's Jack Pitt-Brooke this week in the most revealing of a number of articles already dedicated to this strange, fawn-like figure, who alongside Torreira in that mismatched training snapshot makes up a double-act that could be Arsenal's Del Boy and Rodders engine room for the next six or seven years.

Or, it could not. Certainly you imagine there are no green eyes over at City, whose thrilling slave-death succession planning leaves only the transition from Silva to Silva to manage in central areas this season, a process that should be eased, if anything, by the projected three-month absence of Kevin De Bruyne due to training injury. The midfield coup of the summer, though, surely belongs to Chelsea and their new head coach Maurizio Sarri, whose fag-ash sweet nothings managed to convince Jorginho to spurn Pep Guardiola in favour of a tilt spent slumming it with Billy Idol and all the other have-nots of London's punk-famous King's Road. People aren't talking up Chelsea as title-winners, but they should be: alongside N'Golo Kante and Mateo Kovacič, it’s hard to think of a team with a more en vogue gut anywhere in Europe. It’ll be interesting to see how Guendouzi measures up should he be picked to face them on Saturday.

Elsewhere in the Premier League's upper reaches, Spurs have added nothing, Manchester United have added Fred and Liverpool have added perhaps the ultimate expression of their manager's football in Naby Keïta, a man who seems perfectly capable of running a central midfield, defence and attack all by himself, and who alongside Fabinho forms £100 million worth of calibre and thrust that the combined delights of Gini Wijnaldum and Jordan Henderson might just be unable to replicate.

One Liverpool player it's worth reserving judgement on is James Milner. Discarded by City years ago, regarded initially by the Kop as a willing but ultimately limited playmaking imposter, it's as if all those years spent haring up and down touchlines across the country have instead bestowed upon him a unique sense of late-career enlightenment, a man who ran in straight lines for so long that he nows sees all of the angles, all of the time. Against West Ham last weekend he continued the form that saw him out-assist Luka Modric in the Champions League last season, a tankard-headed Dr Manhattan instigating raids deep into enemy territory, launching zip-wire passes to Liverpool’s cut-throat men of the flanks, smiling his empty-eyed smile as the napalm burned in front of him.

Alongside this resides the queasy reality that Premier League seasons aren't really defined by central-midfield partnerships, but by central-midfield rivalries, that for all the chop and churn this remains a division driven so maniacally onwards by the clattering collisions of determined men disputing fates. In England, destiny is delivered by force, a nine-month-long bouncer haggle that results for one team in a short-lived step beyond the red rope, and for 19 others a graceless return to the wait-queue of elite rejection.

Vieira-Keane; Makélélé-Gerrard, Touré-Carrick, Kanté-everyone, De Bruyne-Kanté. This is a rough timeline of the 38-game engine-room proxy war that has been raging ever since Atkins, Mark Atkins powered little Blackburn Rovers to first place in 1994-95, making 30 appearances and scoring six times seven years after arriving from Scunthorpe as a £45,000 right back. It might take seven years for Guendouzi to match the most crucial of those numbers. What's for sure is that this year title supremacy will ultimately go, as it always does, to the team with the most compelling and competitive midfield mechanisms.

@hydallcodeen