Too much, too young?

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The sight, on Sunday afternoon, of Theo Walcott coming on for Everton as a substitute against Chelsea provided a curious premonition of the news yesterday that the 18-year-old Callum Hudson-Odoi had been called up by Gareth Southgate to England’s senior squad. Because it seems like only yesterday there was all that brouhaha over Walcott, at a slightly younger age, being included in Sven-Göran Eriksson’s England squad to play in the 2006 World Cup. Even now there is the oft-repeated refrain that Eriksson ruined Walcott by including him and that he was never the same again, which is nonsense as, at 17, he was not the finished article to begin with.

That has been much the same sentiment conveyed on Hudson-Odoi by Maurizio Sarri, his head coach at Chelsea, who has so far refrained from including the exciting winger in a Premier League starting line-up this season, preferring to give him the relative nursery slopes of the cup competitions. Sarri has maintained that Hudson-Odoi still has a lot of development to achieve, that it would be "dangerous" to put too much pressure on him, and that the teenager could only become "top" player a few years from now. This has been a recurring managerial philosophy at Chelsea, a club blessed with an insanely successful academy set up, but one with a ceiling made of inch-thick plate glass.

At Stamford Bridge and at away grounds, there only has to be mention of Hudson-Odoi's name over the tannoy, or a glimpse of him warming up for the Chelsea support to break into "Oh, Hudson-Odoi!", sung to the tune of Seven Nation Army. Like his elder teammate and fellow Chelsea Academy product, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, there is genuine excitement for the youngster. Of course, Sarri is right in that he has a lot of improvement ahead of him, but his pace and confidence is something that clearly Southgate wants to tap into. The prevailing Sarri mood, however, is still 'wait and see'. "He will be ready to be at the top at 22 or 23 years," the Chelsea head coach told the media after Chelsea's Europa League first leg tie with Dynamo Kiev, in which Hudson-Odoi came off the bench to score. "We need [him] to improve without the media, of the pressure of the media, fans, the club," conceding that "His training is really very good." But..."When you have pressure when you are 18 it is dangerous, you can lose the target. The target is to improve. So it is dangerous. This is why I don't like to speak about him."

And so Chelsea are left with a conundrum: develop an undoubted talent by giving him more game time (and higher wages), or let him go to Bayern Munich, as he has indicated he'd like to, to guarantee that game time. "Too much, too young", as The Specials sang, is a valid point, and I do have some sympathy for Sarri's view. But only some. As keeps coming up, in radio phone-ins and newspaper comment boxes, that old adage "if you're good enough, you're old enough" does count. Gareth Southgate might be even making a point to Chelsea's head coach that there is no time like the present. I certainly don't disagree.