We don’t know much about how Arsenal found Gabriel Martinelli. We know the club have scouts in South America; we know they spotted a teenager at a fourth division Brazilian club called Ituano FC; we know the contingent asked Johnathan Vidallé and then a growing number of senior figures to fly down to Brazil to watch him; we know they signed him on the back of a scattering of cup performances against clubs from higher tiers. We know that Martinelli then flew back to England, where he’d twice been rejected by Manchester United as a child, for another bite at the cherry. Third time’s the charm.
What we don’t know, really, is why any of this happened. We have a scattering of thoughts from Vidallé’s testimony, a collection of lines to read between. What exactly does a scout see in a young man performing that far below the Premier League to convince him he could rise without getting the bends? “His ability to repeat efforts,” Vidallé said. “He helped with the left-back […] and he finished those sprints with the same speed and lucidity with which he started.” Speed and lucidity; thunder and quiet.
Everything - everything - we know about any football player’s personality moves through several filters before it reaches us. But Martinelli’s quiet is still, I think, obvious. He’s soft spoken and unassuming, carefully polite. He smiles a lot. He’s so often in the background of Arsenal’s media efforts, laughing. Players talk about him fondly; “You wouldn’t meet a nicer guy,” Declan Rice said yesterday. You also wouldn’t know the guy had any thunder in him, but that’s the thing about thunder: it hides until it’s ready, and it always comes after a flash.
Yesterday, Theo Walcott said of Martinelli: “For me this is like an anger, a controlled anger that [he] is showing.” I thought this was the most insightful phrase to emerge from the matchday pandemonium: ‘controlled anger.’ That it emerged from Walcott is especially prescient, as he’s the player Martinelli reminds me of most.
Walcott, like Martinelli, joined Arsenal well before his time. Like Martinelli, he exploded at a level miles below the Premier League and made an enormous jump, but his talent was always obvious, and most so in his sheer speed. He signed a sponsorship deal with Nike at just fourteen; he scored more than a hundred goals for semi-pro club A.F.C. Newbury before professional outfits pounced; he was bizarrely included in England’s World Cup squad at sixteen. Walcott grew up a few miles from me (Newbury was my local town and he, naturally, a local hero) and he has never lost that unflinchingly polite, silent-to-a-fault disposition that is so common among well-raised kids from Berkshire. He is quiet, careful and steady: the rocket fuel of his stardom never rocked the boat. At least, we didn’t see it wobble.
With a football at his feet Walcott was ferocious. He was so quick it became a pre-Twitter meme: when someone completed a crazy sprint on the playground, we used to shout “go on Theo!” at their backs. Speed and lucidity; thunder and quiet.
That’s why I listen when Walcott says Martinelli is playing with a controlled anger: because I bet he’s lived the same. Polite, quiet Berkshire kids are not really allowed to be angry, not with other people, not with circumstance or material conditions or school or parents and certainly not with the near-ruinous pressures of being England’s next great hope. I’ve watched my friends and peers shape their lives around this silent anger in different ways, triumphant and ruinous and steady. Theo Walcott took lightning strides.
There is something about quiet people that leads to a controlled, careful fury. A lucidity. It takes pressure to generate. Turbulence in the clouds: air drifts upwards, water floats down. The water freezes, heat is released, and an unstoppable chain reaction occurs. His contract in tatters and vultures circling, Theo Walcott hits his peak. The flash. Gabriel Martinelli is finally forced out of the starting XI on form. The thunder.
I like to think of that pressure generating as Gabriel Martinelli sits on the bench and watches. It’s not a particularly big leap of imagination, because I feel it too. I know everyone in the stadium does, and everyone watching at home. Say one thing about Mikel Arteta, say he’s a genius at generating pressure.
And pressure has squeezed the stories into a defined and compact shape. On Sunday, Arsenal dominated possession against Pep Guardiola to an extent the Spaniard has never allowed before. If he is the greatest manager of all time, an unmatched genius of incalculable intellect, then this was simply another masterful gambit: he allowed Arsenal to dictate the game, and decided to simply do nothing with the ball in return.
Arteta, meanwhile, is failing the astonishing attacking talents he has assembled by refusing to unleash them. He deserves no praise for the levels Arsenal are now routinely reaching, only criticism for his unwillingness to open the floodgates. He has guided a team into being so good he is now facing routine admonishment for not completely obliterating the best club football teams in the world.
I do not personally subscribe to the idea that starting Mikel Merino means Arteta has decided he does not want to win the game; I do not believe Merino before Eberechi Eze means defence before attack. It doesn’t really matter. Pressure creates flat, smooth shapes of the stories we tell, and twice now Arteta has started a massive Premier League game with three players who have the signifier ‘DM’ on their Ultimate Team card, which is a clear and obvious sign that he doesn’t want to win. This is how football works: in symbols and signals, broad ideas like ‘attacking’ and its antithesis, ‘cowardice’.
I can think of no more powerful a signal than Pep Guardiola camping ten players in his own box. I think it would be perfectly fair, after such a showing, to call the man a total fucking coward, a proponent of ‘Starmer-ball’, an ideologue poisoned by his own sense of inferiority. But I won’t use those words because I understand that when you go away to a team much, much better than you, sometimes this is the best way to get a result. The only conclusion that makes sense then, is that Arsenal are now much, much better than Manchester City - a power shift that just two years ago seemed totally impossible. A natural disaster must have befallen Manchester, I suppose. The tide simply moved in, then out again. It was the moon!
Air drifts upwards. This pressure is of Arteta’s own making: he has turned Arsenal into a team that look so capable of winning either the Premier League or Champions League or both that not doing either would be agonising. I don’t want to pretend that pressure is not real or that I don’t share the desperation, because I do. But the Arsenal I dreamed of watching is not an all-conquering superpower that wins relentlessly in the era of managerial carousels and petrostates, but an Arsenal that competes, that I identify with, and an Arsenal that delivers on its promise of pride. That Arsenal is here, and has been here, and I worry we’re all missing the flash as we wait for the thunder.
This is evident in so many of the stories told about Sunday. Arsenal don’t look like champions because Martinelli’s anger led him to run, screaming, to the corner flag when he scored; Arsenal don’t look like champions because the stadium exploded when the pressure was released. Champions don’t celebrate joy, they brush such distractions aside. They are machines that print titles when you press a button. But of course Arsenal don’t have this calculated efficiency because they have never been champions: this is a group of young people still in the state of becoming. That is the source of the pressure: how long is this going to take?
All we can do is hope the energy building in the clouds is enough to release a bolt of lightning directly at the ground. In the meantime, let us learn something from Gabriel Martinelli and Theo Walcott and all the quiet kids who explode into a controlled ferocity when the pressure spills over: steady hands. No tremors. Lucidity. Controlled anger.
Let the crystalline water melt and strike its fellows in a frenetic blur; let the electrons shear and carry their negative charge downwards; let the thunder come.
This is the real deal. It gave me a restoring flash of recognition. I have grown weary of so much football writing - emotionally desiccated, as though something less than beauty and connection made us pledge allegiance to a club.
It is hard to write with feeling without the syntax short-circuiting, but you do it beautifully here, much like Martinelli has handled his frustrations in his last two second-half appearances.
“Trust the process” is wheeled out by online snarks every time a result goes against Arsenal. But my support isn’t a contract to be torn up by a dip in form. My investment runs deeper - because to watch the team becoming is no less glorious than to watch them being. There is delight in seeing a plan take shape, and when the titles and trophies come, those moments will burn all the brighter in my memory.
Beautifully written. A stadium exploding with joy (or me trying to contain my joy and not look like a crazy person while I watch in a cafe on a Monday morning on the other side of the world) is a beautiful thing, what following sport should be about. If you're robotic until the day you win something, it's a pretty miserable existence.