Considering Manchester City have been dominant for years, it is natural for fans and pundits alike to wonder if Arsenal finally have players of the same ilk as them.
Mikel Arteta’s side play a gorgeous brand of football, with several players in their ranks who could be classed as some of the very best in Europe.
Names like Declan Rice, Bukayo Saka, William Saliba and Martin Odegaard instantly spring to mind as far as Arsenal go.
Anton Ferdinand says even if Kyle Walker has not been at his best, he is still a superior right-back to Ben White
Another one of them is Ben White.
Initially, Anton Ferdinand was asked whether Kyle Walker or Ben White should be the right-back in a combined XI involving players from City and Arsenal.
“Kyle Walker!”, he replied on FIVE’s official YouTube channel.
Anton Ferdinand was told that Kyle Walker has not been at his typically brilliant best for Manchester City this season, while Ben White has had yet another impressive campaign.
“I get it, that’s still above Ben White”, Ferdinand said.
One cannot be a prisoner of the moment when discussing elite players like Kyle Walker
In our view, the way Anton Ferdinand has gone about siding with Kyle Walker over Ben White is completely fair.
An argument can be made that White has outperformed Walker this season.
But then again, the treble-winner has been one of, if not the best right-back in the world for years and with that in mind, his status as arguably the gold standard for players in his position cannot be discounted so easily.
As excellent a player as Ben White is, he has yet to ever play at a standard where one names him amongst the elite players in world football.
A superstar like Vinicius Junior feels Kyle Walker is the best defender he has ever had to go face-to-face with in his career, which goes to show the standard he has set over the years.
For a player of Walker’s standing in the game, for form to be the only determinant of how highly one should rate them would result in being short-sighted in the assessment about him.