Born to be a gunner

José Antonio Reyes pinches my tape recorder and turns it towards Manuel Almunia, the Spanish goalkeeper. Putting on his interviewer’s voice, he asks Arsenal’s new signing: ‘So, Almunia, to start with, how have your first days at the club been?” Before Reyes sits down to answer a single question, one thing is clear: he is part of the Arsenal family.

Seven months after signing from Seville, Reyes is comfortable with his surroundings. He recognises his role in the side, feels the club is his, and is comfortable with expectations and demands. Reyes moves around with the authority and confidence he used to have at Sevilla. Very impressive for a 20-year-old.

The first questions are inevitable: how will Arsenal look without Patrick Vieira, and how have the squad lived through the soap opera of the summer?

‘Patrick has not hidden at all. He has faced the music from the beginning, although he has not talked much about it to anybody and did not train. The players have been trying to guess about his future and we know it will be almost impossible to beat a Real Madrid with him.

”He eats with me at the same table and I wind him up, ‘You are going to Madrid’, and he laughs all the time. He is a man you can speak to anytime, he is so affable. To lose someone like him is a huge blow, but when Madrid want something, they tend to get it.”

Reyes soon switches to automatic and answers questions with almost the same words he used in previous interviews.

He speaks in an unusual accent: the Spanish equivalent of a Scouser trying to sound like a BBC presenter. In short sentences, delivered at high speed, he finds enough confidence to face the part of his profession he likes least — explaining himself.

‘Each coach has his way of doing things, but training is very similar here and Spain. Surprisingly, the biggest difference is that at Arsenal we use more ball than in Spain. Everything is done with a football and that for a player is very important.

‘Joaquin Caparros, my coach at Sevilla, used to speak to us much more, but Arsene Wenger is one of those that says little and lets people do the talking on the pitch. There are fewer technical talks, which is great.

”And the strikers do not have as many defensive obligations as at Sevilla, where we had to go back to our own box sometimes. Wenger prefers us to stay in the opposite half constantly. And that is it. When we are not training, it is the same — we can do whatever we please.”

He has set up home in Bedfordshire. His mother, father and girlfriend live with him for now and those who know him well are aware it could not be any other way. ‘I go shopping with my family, we spend time discovering the city. I have been here for six months and I am still learning about my surroundings.”

The rest of the time, he takes his English lessons and plays football on his PlayStation, sometimes until midnight. It has been known for friends to beg him to let them go home. He mostly watches Spanish television but also likes English music and sport channels.

After the teen-magazine questions, he rests back and becomes the 20-year-old José Antonio again, and the reality of his uneasy settling in London comes out.

‘The first few months were awful. I just wanted to go home and was ill because of it. Many people couldn’t understand why I left Seville and would tell me how difficult it was going to be to adapt.

‘At first I thought they were right, that I couldn’t cope. It has changed now, thank God. I feel protected by the club. Having the family around has helped enormously. Once you are used to it, you can live anywhere,” he says, almost convincingly.

‘I go to Seville when they give us free days but in the pre-season we are not getting so many. I cannot help but miss the rest of my family — my brother who just got married and especially my grandad. I would love to have him with me, but he has heart troubles and I am scared that the trip would kill him.”

And, when in Seville, once he has visited his family, he goes to see the other love of his life, the Virgin of Consolation.

‘I am a big devotee of Our Lady. I have her everywhere, at home, in London. I pray to her practically every day. I don’t ask her anything, I have it all, thank God, so I thank her for her help and support. She has been very good to me.”

Reyes was not aware he was born for English football until he arrived at Highbury.

‘I prefer English football to Spanish. In Spain it has less pace, less rhythm, it breaks up too often. I love it here, with the constant box-to-box action and even the fair play — nobody demands cards for others.”

Using his skills in a different environment has helped Reyes realise how far he has come and how much he still has to learn. Reyes became someone in England against Chelsea last season, when he scored two goals and set the standards he has since imposed on himself.

‘I will never forget it because I felt nobody knew much about me and it was a way of introducing myself. Now we have to win the league again, it should be the priority, and keep growing after that. We will have another go at the Champions League, although I have no idea why we cannot do better in Europe.

‘You know, since we met up after the holidays, we haven’t talked about Chelsea or Manchester United at all. We are only interested in ourselves. The best thing in this team is that nobody feels superior, nobody is arrogant, nobody acts as the boss, but also we have a feeling of working for the same cause.”

Almost three quarters of an hour answering questions about himself is something Reyes would prefer not to have done, but there is one more before he goes to joke with teammates Cesc Fabregas and Almunia. If he could bring only one thing from Spain, what would that be?

‘My grandad,” he says, barely making an effort to hide the melancholy that will accompany his English adventure. —