Goals win games. An adage repeated again and again in football at any level. It’s something I hear in the North Bank every other week, and it’s something my first football coach would repeat every week. As a logical argument it follows with little fuss. To win a game of football you have to outscore your opponent, simple. Accepting this conclusion, you might be tempted to go even further. Go as far as saying that goals are all that matter in football. Without them you cannot have victory, without victory you cannot have glory. To the brain this is a fairly convincing argument, and yet it cannot convince the heart. In our hearts, there has to be something more. To best explain this, I call upon one of the modern game’s great entertainers.
Enter Gabriel Jesus.
Since his arrival at Arsenal, no player has dropped jaws quite as consistently as Jesus. Whether it’s his superglue first touch plucking the ball out of the air or a mazy run through a non-existent gap in the defence, Jesus seems to make time stand still in the Emirates. This was established within the opening exchanges of his Premier League debut for the club at Selhurst Park, with a hop, a skip, and a nutmeg he danced into the penalty area. Unfortunately he could not find his feet to finish.
If you were to ask any given Arsenal fan to describe the Brazilian in a word you can make a fairly educated guess as to what the most common answers would be. Magical. Audacious. Outrageous. What you may notice at this juncture is that none of these words relate to his finishing ability.
Indeed, Gabriel Jesus is a striker who is adored more for what he does with the ball than where puts it. In his first season for Arsenal he finished with 11 goals in 26 Premier League appearance, 14 goals is the highest he has ever reached in the competition. Anyone who has seen him play would agree that he could never be described as prolific. This is to the extent that over the course of the 2022/23 season it became a running joke on Twitter over the excitement of celebrating the first Jesus BCM (big chance missed) upon his return from injury. Naturally this came within minutes of his return against Fulham, picking up the ball in midfield he ended a sequence of tight interplay with Fabio Vieira by smacking the ball straight at Bernd Leno. Quite simply Jesus is a scorer of great goals – see his confident finish against PSV in the Champions League and an expert in almost spectacular ones.