Wednesday’s trip to Port Vale in the third round of the Carabao Cup provide the perfect opportunity for squad rotation.

Our manager was asked in his pre-match press conference at the Sobha Realty Training Centre on Tuesday if he’ll be selecting players who haven’t had many minutes so far this season.

“Yes, it's a lot of players that are going to take part in that and they fully deserve the minutes,” he explained. “Kepa, for sure, is one of them. He's been with us, his attitude, the way he supports us in every aspect of his role in the best possible manner. All this as well, they deserve more minutes than what they're getting.”

Max Dowman is another player who could feature, having impressed during his cameos with the first team.

Last weekend, he was back among the goals for our under-21s in a 3-2 win over Wolves.

So how do our coaching staff handle the balancing act of making sure Dowman gets plenty of minutes, while also regularly exposing him to the first team environment?

“Well, it’s about learning from him probably,” Mikel said. “First of all, preparing and having a very good understanding of his new situation and all the things that are different in his life.

“So we need to change his times, we need to change his education, probably his allocation and where he is with his family. His diet is different, his sleep patterns become different, the training load is different, the amount of information, pressure, exposure is different. So we have to manage a lot of factors.

“Into that, a lot of factors, you add a lot of minutes with very different teams as well. We need to be cautious. And that's what we are trying to do in the best possible way to find that balance to keep Max as connected as possible with the first team because he's undoubtedly a player that can help the first team.

“But that's why we need the right mixture of minutes like he did the other day with the under-23s and with England to have that exposure when he needs to play with us, he's ready to do that.”

Asked how our older players initially responded to Dowman beating them with trickery in training, Arteta added: “At the beginning, they responded immediately - kick him! That was the first one. And Max, to be fair, he was excellent, stood up and got into the next one.

“You can really take it personally, for someone who was 14 last year, at some point when he was doing certain things to players, and now everybody loves him. You just want to hug him, help him. He's such a nice boy as well and he's very much liked by everybody here and just looking after us.

“It brings responsibility to look after somebody with that talent and make sure we just do what we have to do to make sure we're given the best chance to exploit his talent, that's all.”