Mikel Arteta looked the happiest he’s been this season after the final whistle, but when Sky Sports reporter Patrick Davison enquired about Kai Havertz, things got briefly very personal.
“I said to him yesterday: ‘When I met my wife, at the beginning it was hard to conquer her,’” the Spanish manager said with a smile, drawing a (little clumsy) parallel between the new midfielder’s struggles to find his feet in an Arsenal shirt and his prolonged courtship of Argentine-Spanish actress Lorena Bernal.
“I had to try and message, and go and go, and at the end when she said, ‘Yes, we will be together’, it’s beautiful. If she had said ‘yes’ on the first day, it’s not that great.” The key, he added, was being “persistent — and determined”.
You know things must be fairly serious when a coach as urbane as Arteta starts channelling Swiss Toni, the cringetastic American car salesman from the BBC’s 1990s comedy series The Fast Show, who compared every mundane activity to “making love to a beautiful woman”.
Thomas Tuchel was, incidentally, moved to go down a similar path in April 2021 as Chelsea manager in an effort to get Timo Werner scoring again after an interminable barren spell. “If a woman does not want to go out with you to dinner, you cannot…
