The facet of his game Arsenal's Eberechi Eze has improved to satisfy Mikel Arteta, how he reacted to manager's 'clean feedback' and how Declan Rice thinks they can get even more out of hot-shot midfielder

In an age where football is always seeking the next sensation, Arsenal were still basking in sheer delight with Max Dowman on Tuesday night, with a two-page spread featuring every frame of his Everton goal in their match programme, headlined ‘History in the Making’. It felt like a collector’s item.

There is already discussion of whether some of the club’s last young prospects, Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly, must be moved on this summer. Such is the dispensability of players. The joy of the new can be so brutally fleeting.

It’s why there was such deep satisfaction to take from the fact that the win over Bayer Leverkusen – a performance outstripping anything we’ve seen from Arsenal in months – was built on two British players, Eberechi Eze and Declan Rice , who’ve had to deal with rejection and, by travelling on in search of acceptance, proved that there is a life beyond the game’s rush to judge and to cast players off like an old sock.

Eze was the prime example – a player who, having contended with the blows that rejection by Arsenal’s academy, Fulham , Reading and Millwall must have dealt his self-esteem, has found himself struggling to find the way when returning to his boyhood club this season.

There was the punishing half-time substitution at Aston Villa in December for letting Matty Cash in to score, and even when outstanding in a Carabao Cup win at Port Vale, the distinct sense given off by Mikel Arteta that he was lacking in something.

‘He was very capable,' was Arteta’s cool response after Eze’s performance that night. 'He needs to play more with those guys to understand the timings and actions so he will be more consistent and successful with us.' This felt rather harsh.

Declan Rice congratulates Eberechi Eze on his wonder strike on Tuesday night

Eze lets fly to score - but it is his work off the ball that has won over his manager Mikel Arteta

But what coaches up and down the land see as the vital component of star quality is a willingness to take criticism – or ‘clean feedback’ as Rice once called it – and not assume you are God’s gift. What Arteta seemed to be suggesting on that bitter autumn night at Port Vale was that Eze needed to join the press, and his comments about the 27-year-old in the Emirates media theatre late on Tuesday told us that the player has crossed that Rubicon now.

‘Without that, you have no chance to play in this team,’ Arteta said of the pressing. ‘Because everybody does it, and that's the magic of it. He can do it. If he could not do it, I would never demand it. He can do it. He's willing to do it, and he's doing it better and better every day.’

Arteta is not a dispenser of platitudes, so this was significant. More significant, indeed, than Eze’s sumptuous 36th-minute strike which sent Arsenal on their way.

The Champions League is good for Eze, with the extra space it affords allowing him more time than the brutal week-to-week rigours of the Premier League. Yet StatsPerform data shows that he is joining the press more in Arsenal’s domestic campaign, too - regaining possession 4.28 times per game on average in his past seven games compared with 3.47 in his other appearances this season, and turning over possession 1.71 times on average in the final third, more than double his earlier contribution.

This facet appears to have been prioritised over tackles and duels. Eze still has his imperfections, conceding possession more than once on Tuesday night when running with the ball at his feet, yet has that finishing power whose absence can feel like an Achilles heel for Arsenal. Rice said afterwards he has never seen a player strike a ball so cleanly - with either foot - as Eze and that the Gunners must do more to utilise that.

‘We understand him a lot better,’ said Arteta, with the maturity of a coach who knows that you cannot improve a player by simply browbeating him. If Eze can continue to be fundamental to Arsenal, he will join a list of players, including Raheem Sterling when working on his finishing with Arteta at Manchester City, who can say the Spaniard’s attention to the details of their game has improved them.

This also goes for Rice, whose sobering appreciation of how football can spit you out came when he was forced to leave Chelsea behind as a 14-year-old and start again at West Ham.

Rice’s performance on Tuesday night bore witness to the way he has grown from a more cautious, defence-minded No 6 at West Ham into a marauding No 8 for Arteta. It was that ambition which brought him racing up to double Arsenal’s lead with a waft of that right instep which has been fundamental to the club’s set-piece goals. Rice covered 11.8km against Leverkusen, more than any other Arsenal player, as he repeatedly advanced to join the attack.

Rice strokes home his goal to seal Arsenal's win and progression to the quarter-finals of the Champions League

Rice’s performance on Tuesday night bore witness to the way he has grown from a more cautious, defence-minded No 6 at West Ham into a marauding No 8 for Arteta

That extraordinary whip he can apply to a ball might not have been a part of his weaponry had Arteta and Arsenal’s set-piece coach Nicolas Jover not encouraged him to work at it during a winter break in Dubai in 2024.

It is thought that criticism from Graeme Souness, in his Daily Mail Sport column, that Rice did not score enough goals did register with him yet he, like Eze, looked within rather than stew on it.

In his club captain’s match programme on Tuesday, Martin Odegaard was also fizzing with Dowman and that goal – ‘it was something he will never forget and neither will we’ - but the defining image of the night was the one dominating the Daily Mail’s back page on Wednesday morning, depicting Eze and Rice in rapturous unison.

Theirs has been a road less travelled in football. Arsenal can reap the benefit of their education in the moment of greatest need.