While speaking about it on YouTube, Watts lamented: “Martinelli, I gave a six [out of ten], mainly because of that amazing run in the second half, which I think we were all just begging for him to finish off.
“It would have been one of the truly great goals and it was such a shame that he did all that hard work, ran all that way, beat all those players, and then just after he goes around the ‘keeper, the guy gets back and clears it before he can roll it into an empty net.
“It would have been an absolutely amazing goal. That was a real, real shame.”
Will Gabriel Martinelli score 15 goals this season?
Yes
No
Has Martinelli ever scored a brilliant solo goal for Arsenal?
Martinelli has been in pretty impressive form for the Gunners over the course of the season, starting all but one of the club’s 26 Premier League games so far, providing 11 goals and two assists.
Interestingly enough, though, he is yet to score in Europe this term despite having played six times in the competition. This goal would have been a brilliant way to put an end to that run and it’s not as if he doesn’t have previous of scoring such fantastic goals, either.
Indeed, against Chelsea in the 2019/20 season, he ran 67 yards in 13 seconds to score in superb fashion – while the effort ended up being voted as the Arsenal Goal of the Season.
What’s more, in pre-season against Fiorentina in 2019 when Martinelli had just joined the club, he once more ran from his own half, nutmegging a defender, only to agonisingly send the ball wide.
Seeing as it’s the sort of goal most players can only dream of, it’s quite incredible that Martinelli has nearly repeated the trick on three occasions.