Saka plays on and on – but how long can Arsenal’s fulcrum keep coming?

Bukayo Saka has played 212 games for Arsenal and England in the first four years of his career as a regular starter. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

There was something cute, and apt, and agreeably Deep Arsenal about the fact Bukayo Saka scored the club’s first goal back in the Champions League on Wednesday night, a moment of ceremonial coming-out for this Mikel Arteta iteration, with a slightly bobbled right-foot shot.

The Emirates Stadium was built to house these occasions, finessed and overseen by the great Euro-moderniser Arsène Wenger. Even its design feels like an economist’s idea of a sporting cathedral, with its echoes of the steel and glass mega-structures of the City of London two miles to the south.