David Raya has bigger prizes in his sights but winning the Premier League‘s Golden Glove in his first season at Arsenal will be a source of great satisfaction to the Spanish international.
The 28-year-old has faced constant scrutiny since joining the Gunners from Brentford in August but not even his harshest critics can dispute his record since displacing Aaron Ramsdale in Mikel Arteta’s starting line-up.
Raya kept his 15th clean sheet of the season during Arsenal’s 3-0 win over Bournemouth last Saturday, an impressive feat considering he has only played 30 games. Between February and April, he kept clean sheets in six consecutive away league games. Not even David Seaman or Jens Lehmann managed that during their illustrious spells as Arsenal’s gatekeepers.
“It’s a huge success for the team in this league to achieve that [Raya’s Golden Glove] with a few games to go still,” Arteta said last weekend.
“It gives us a huge foundation to be closer to winning trophies. The contribution from everybody including David obviously, is really good.”
Winning individual awards, competing for major honours and earning a place in Arsenal’s record books is a world away from where Raya began his career, at Southport County in the National League almost a decade ago.
You have to squint for a few seconds to make out Raya’s features when you examine pictures of him during that half-season stint in the seaside town that straddles Merseyside and Lancashire.
His hairstyle is clipped short, in contrast to the fade and wavy fringe combo that he has now. His cheeks are decorated with stubble rather than a well-manicured beard, and his nose hasn’t yet suffered the trauma of a horror collision at the Hawthorns that, in his words, nearly had teammates at Blackburn Rovers “throwing up” on the pitch.
Raya was sent to Southport to gain first-team experience after joining Blackburn from Cornella in Catalonia at 17. It was a vastly different setup to what he had grown accustomed to at his parent club.
“When you’re in a Category One academy, you’re playing on the best pitches, playing with the best balls, some of the best players nationally.
“I think going to Southport probably showed a different side of the game that we probably couldn’t recreate internally here,” Ben Benson, who coached Raya at Blackburn, tells i, which is a diplomatic way of saying he was sent there to toughen up.
“Here, you take your own kit, get your shorts and everything – it’s very different,” Rob Urwin, Southport’s head of media, told Arsenal recently.
“He’s very humble about it and says that it was that time that made him realise that he’ll need to fight to get to the top and obviously he’s done that.”
Those early loan spells can be the making or breaking of academy players and while Raya had an inauspicious start, he soon settled into his new environment.
He played a key role in Southport’s thrilling FA Cup run which culminated in a man-of-the-match display against Derby County in the third round and returned to Blackburn a better, more rounded keeper.
He had to bide his time before making his mark at Ewood Park, though. Raya played seven times in the Championship in the space of 15 months and it wasn’t until the 2017-18 season after Blackburn Rovers had been relegated to League One that he established himself as their first-choice keeper at the age of 21.
“He was a very technically sound goalkeeper who had phenomenal athleticism,” says Benson, who has also coached Jason Steele and Thomas Kaminski at Blackburn and Dean Henderson and James Trafford at Carlisle United.
“He was very studious, very analytical and critical of himself. His ability to fail fast, fix fast was phenomenal. He would grasp things very, very quickly.”
Benson also remembers him as being like a “street footballer”, a tag ordinarily reserved for outfield players with a penchant for showboating.
“He wasn’t necessarily interested in all of the bells and whistles and extra equipment in training,” he says.
“He wanted to be in all the finishing drills, no matter how many sets there were. He was happy to get his hands dirty, happy to stay out there all day doing the extra bits.
“As a young player, it was just the enthusiasm to train and do extra to get better.”
Along with the other keepers, he would use warm-up sessions before proper training to practice new skills, channelling his inner street footballer by trying things that Benson and Blackburn’s other goalkeeping coaches hadn’t seen before.
One of his routines was even implemented into Blackburn’s coaching programme for the club’s younger age groups.
“I always remember seeing little snippets in training and thinking ‘oh, blimey, that’s a little bit different,'” Benson says.
“He would always play on his weak hand. So as a right hander, if somebody was blocking his passing lane or preventing him from feeding it out quick, he would change his hands and actually throw from his left hand.
“It wasn’t something that I’d seen [before] but what we then did as a result of seeing David do that frequently was put that into the academy programme. And we said to our goalies that to play in the top end of this league and hopefully move on, you may have to be prepared to play off both hands. So we actually structured some training around what we saw him do.”
Raya kept 17 clean sheets to help Rovers earn promotion to the Championship and played in all but four of their matches in the second-tier as they finished comfortably in mid-table.
It was during that campaign that Raya suffered a horrendous injury to his nose that required reconstructive surgery after being clattered by Jay Rodriguez’s boot during a game against West Brom.
“I had six or seven stitches – the bone had got stuck into my skull,” Raya told Brentford’s website in May last year. “That’s all I remember. I went straight to the hospital. But I only missed one game!”
“It was a horrific injury,” Benson says. “I went straight to the hospital afterwards and stayed with him for a few hours. Although he may not have known the gravity of the injury at that moment in time, he had a desire and willingness to get back straight away.
“He raced himself back for the team. I think that gives a really good insight into his personality.”
That summer Raya moved on to Brentford where his distribution began to get noticed in a team that played a more progressive brand of football than Blackburn which ultimately captured the attention of Arsenal.
“Brentford took him on a wonderful journey, they exposed him to different styles of play which I think accelerated his development,” Benson says.
“There was a heck of a lot of work done with David by the previous goalkeeper coaches [at Blackburn] and Inaki [Cana, now goalkeeper coach at Arsenal] and Manu [Sotelo] at Brentford. It’s a credit to them also.”
Raya has unquestionably benefited from playing behind the best defensive unit in the Premier League this term. William Saliba and Gabriel have emerged as the division’s strongest centre-back pairing, while Arsenal’s pressing from the front, particularly since the turn of the year, has been immense.
Arsenal have restricted their opponents to the lowest quality chances in the Premier League, based on expected goals against (xGA). They have conceded 28 goals in 36 matches, at least five better than any other club.
Raya may have made individual errors that have contributed towards a few of those goals including in the north London derby when he passed the ball straight to Cristian Romero to score, but he has grown in authority as the season has progressed.
Arteta has backed him all the way, frequently praising his mentality to bounce back from mistakes and highlighting his bravery on the ball when put under pressure.
Those traits have been evident to the coaches who have worked with him throughout his journey from non-league to the Premier League.
“Did I know he was going to play for one of the best teams in the Premier League? Well, I certainly wouldn’t have backed against it, because he had attributes – mentally, technically, tactically, athletically – that could get him there,” Benson says.
“I’m super proud of him and I know everyone at Blackburn is very proud of what he’s gone on to do.”
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