Last year, Martin Ødegaard returned to Drammen, the small town in Norway where he grew up. He went back to the pitch where he learned to play and found that the gravel surface he remembered had been replaced with artificial grass. The kids kicking a ball about on the pitch, he observed, didn’t seem as committed as he had been. In his day, these games had really mattered.
The tone couldn’t have been more middle-aged. Of course things were better in his day, of course they were tougher. They didn’t have these fancy facilities and it didn’t do them any harm, did it? Ødegaard might be the oldest 24‑year‑old in the world. Some prodigies never grow up: Theo Walcott, Anthony Martial and Jack Butland still feel as though they’re in their late teens, just waiting to explode into the full majesty suggested by their potential. Others feel as though they go overnight from prospect to elder statesman.
It is eight years since Ødegaard, clad in a striped top he had grabbed from his bedroom floor, hair uncombed, weary from the flight, was whisked straight from the airport to a press conference at which he was presented as a Real Madrid player. He seems to have been around for an eternity, plays with an elegant maturity, and yet this is only his third full season of football for a club in one of Europe’s top six leagues.
While others might have lost their heads amid a frenetic opening at St James’ Parkon Sunday, he retained his composure and slowly wrested the game his way. It’s not just his passing, although that is obviously exceptional; or his goals, of which he now has 15 this season; it’s the air of authority he projects. The result is that there is a glow in the embers of Arsenal’s title challenge yet and that it is not, as it might have been, possible for Manchester City to be confirmed as champions next Sunday.
It is very unlikely that City will slip up against Everton or Chelsea, but if they do Arsenal at least remain in a position from which they can take advantage. Whatever happens, there will be regrets at the two-goal leads lost against Liverpool and West Ham, at the two-goal lead given up to Southampton, but to have fallen away completely would have felt a betrayal of the start of this season. Imagine Frank Lampard, the last visiting manager to avoid defeat at the Etihad Stadium, does it again. If Arsenal had failed to keep up at least the semblance of a pursuit they would never forgive themselves. And resolve, however futile it may prove, is never a bad attribute for a team to demonstrate.
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Ødegaard’s level dropped as much as anybody’s in those costly second halves against Liverpool and West Ham, as his passing went awry. That it was so eye-catching an indication spoke perhaps of how unexpected it was, how out of character it seemed. But it was the Norwegian who led the fightback against Southampton and as tempers frayed in the first half at St James’ Park, Newcastle apparently appalled that teams other than them should time waste and feign injury (cheap jibes aside, this a growing problem across the league that needs urgent resolution), it was his calmness that stood out.
“You do not have to scream to be a captain,” Granit Xhaka has said of Ødegaard. “You need to understand what to say, when to say it, and to whom to say it. He is very humble, he is quiet as a person, he is not someone who talks a lot, and he does not talk very loudly. But when he says something, the message comes very clearly to us players. That’s the key. It makes him very special.” Mainly, though, Ødegaard leads by example. Excellent as Jorginho was alongside him in midfield, it was Ødegaard who offered a threat, Ødegaard who made Newcastle nervous.
Arsenal had barely been out of their half in an opening 14 minutes in which Newcastle had hit the post and seen a penalty taken from them by VAR, when Ødegaard took Jorginho’s pass 25 yards out and clipped a precisely low shot past an unsighted Nick Pope and into the bottom corner. It produced a moment of disconcerting silence that was only intensified by the distant hum of Arsenal celebrations high in the Leazes End. Newcastle hopes almost palpably left the stadium and they never quite recovered, in part because Ødegaard’s subsequent passing kept threatening to unpick their high line, forcing them to drop deeper.
Add in the strikes against West Ham and Southampton and two almost identical goals against Chelsea, an achievement only partly diminished by the fact it was Lampard’s Chelsea, and he has five goals in his five games, taking his season’s tally in the league to 15, seven more than he has managed before. When the full assessment of this season is made by Mikel Arteta, Ødegaard will be judged a great success, a part of the team already at the highest level.
He, presumably, will recuperate with some typically middle-aged pastime: mowing the lawn, perhaps, completing a tapestry, or moaning some more about the youth of today. In a team that has often quailed under pressure, though, early maturity is a great boon. It was away at Newcastle last season that Arsenal’s season fell apart. This season it is away at Newcastle that it has been patched back together.
