When Gabriel Martinelli was first ruled out of Mikel Arteta’s plans in July following knee surgery, the news came as a frustrating but manageable blow.
The team, buoyed by the 19-year-old Brazilian’s commitment to a new four-year deal, were preparing for an FA Cup final, and the manager’s rebuilding job seemed to be firmly in hand. That feeling of promise now seems a distant, blurry memory.
The good news for Arsenal is that Martinelli looks likely to be fit to play some part before the end of December. With the drought that has laid waste to the team’s goal harvest this season, his return cannot come soon enough for Arteta, who espoused a cautious optimism ahead of the player’s return.
His team have scored just once in the league from open play since the win against Sheffield United on 4th October. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, despite being rotated through a range of positions across the forward line, has netted once since the opening weekend and Arteta has no readily apparent and reliable alternative up-front.
Certainly Nicolas Pepe fails to satisfy either of those conditions. The club’s £72 million record signing was red carded for a head-butt on Leeds’ Ezgjan Alioski last month, is suspended for the upcoming games against Tottenham and Burnley and has badly lost his way. This week, there was talk that Arsenal may even look to sell the Ivory Coast international in January.
With Alexandre Lacazette also without a league goal since September, the spotlight has fallen on Bukayo Saka, now an England international but still a tender 19, to pick up the slack from his misfiring teammates. This reliance on Saka, still learning his trade, to provide a conceptual spark has been of the gravest concern during Arsenal’s long, cold autumn.
It is understandable that Arteta is eager for the same pressure not to fall on Martinelli. The 19-year-old may have last term become the first teenager for 20 years to score double figures in an Arsenal season, but the manager has acknowledged, at least outwardly, that there is more harm than good to be done by throwing the youngster into troubled waters and expecting him to push back the tide.
“Time is the key word in this industry and nobody’s going to give you time,” said Arteta. “The moment the ball doesn’t go in the net and you lose a match, you’re going to question all the rest. So with Gabi it’s the same. Now he needs time.
“He’s done it for a period of time or in certain moments throughout a game. But consistently for three years, for two years, for a year? He’s never done it. I’m sorry. He’s never done it. So we cannot put that pressure on him.
“It’s like with Bukayo [Saka] and other young players we have. They’ve never done it in their careers. Why are you expecting them to do it today?”
And yet, the Brazilian’s return promises buoyancy for a club that looks as though it’s forgotten what good news sounds like. Arsenal experienced a collective sigh of relief when Martinelli marked his debut with a superb two-goal performance in a 5-0 win against Nottingham Forest last September, a promise that something of what once made the club great had survived in existential form somewhere in the dust of the Emirates Stadium rafters.
This side of the penny poses a promising theory, that it is precisely a player of Martinelli’s upstart precociousness that will be required to lift Arsenal’s spinning tyres out of the mud.
This is a team that looks mentally exhausted, alarmingly so given the demands yet to be made by this most relentlessly draining of seasons. In such moments, the devil-may-care pomp of a talented teenager in form could be worth its weight in gold.
“Gabi is another one who, even in a moment of adversity, you see his energy, his passion, his motivation,” said Arteta. “He is translating positive emotions to everybody.
“The more players you have to add to that, at the end that gets translated to what happens on the football pitch. Gabi brings something different to the team, and we need players like him.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/39Ij5SG
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