According to the song that echoed from Craven Cottage’s away end, to the tune of Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Gabriel Jesus is a dab hand at turning water into wine. Arsenal have savoured the aftertaste during his three months out injured, his absence barely felt by a side whose supreme energy levels have not let up, but it still felt a significant moment when he jogged on for the latter stages of this Thameside cruise.
Mikel Arteta’s players had swamped a poor Fulham and quickly ensured the outcome was beyond doubt, and here came a new flex in a symbolic return for the player who first propelled their levels through the roof.
“He’s changed our dynamic, changed our belief and put the team in a different status,” Arteta had said before kick-off. The calculated hope upon signing Jesus last summer was that his star quality would rub off on those around him and create winners: his exertions from the front and sheer knowhow would wind everyone else up, and then you could watch them go. It has worked out exactly that way. Even without Jesus, Arsenal have been playing with fire, precision and relentlessness that would not have been possible before he arrived.
That is hardly to say Jesus has not been missed. The appetite for news of his comeback had been voracious all week; when Arsenal travelled to Lisbon for their Europa League last-16 tie on Wednesday breathless rumours of his presence in the party swept social media, neither the club nor Arteta doing anything to dampen them. In fact he was tucked away at London Colney limbering up for this one, before emerging from the bus here to a palpable buzz. When he replaced Leandro Trossard 13 minutes from time, Arsenal’s fans maintained one long, unbroken note before breaking into cheers when he crossed the line.
Jesus has scored in only four games for Arsenal, drawing blanks in his past 11, but Arteta was correct to point out the intangibles he has brought. It feels gratifying they are not lost on those who watch regularly. There was one chance to return with a bang, denied by Bernd Leno at the end of a sweeping move Jesus had begun himself, but he had spent most of the afternoon watching a team that now pulsates with the attributes he coaxed out.
Arsenal were helped by the fact Fulham looked beaten from kick-off. Marco Silva’s assertion that “at certain moments” before the interval his side appeared to be absent from the pitch was generous. There was an incident in the eighth minute when Antonee Robinson, crunching into Bukayo Saka, attempted to show Arsenal their opponents were in the building. Saka, the best player in this season’s Premier League and arguably the toughest, simply picked himself up before contributing fully to the exhibition of speed, power and control. Robinson endured the kind of first half that rears up in nightmares.
It was Saka’s 36th start of the season in all competitions, if England’s World Cup campaign is included. Arteta has made a project of transforming him into a machine who can play, play and play again: not going through the motions, either, but delivering every time. Saka will not hit the target his manager set in October of “70 matches, every three days” but he has come to epitomise the robustness, remarkable in a team so young, that continues to set Arsenal apart.
He was, like almost everyone else in an all black away kit that created an appropriately one-note spectacle alongside Fulham’s home getup, heavily involved in a sumptuous second goal that offered modern-day Arsenal in microcosm. That sequence ended with Leandro Trossard standing up a cross for Gabriel Martinelli, a player galvanised by Jesus’ presence earlier in the season who looks similarly menacing having struck up an understanding with the Belgian. Trossard was brilliant here: twisty, inventive, exact; if Mykhaylo Mudryk may have been the long-term bet, Arsenal’s raid of Brighton now looks a bargain. It could prove a cheat code to the depth and experience that pull teams over the line.
The belief they will make it is growing. This was the first game of an away run that, with Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester City all in wait, looks menacing but it was navigated with ease. For the first time, those tributes to Manfred Mann were accompanied by proclamations that Arsenal would win the league. The previous week they had taken things to the wire; this time they ensured there were few questions to answer while offering a tantalising glimpse, in the shape of Jesus, that they have plenty in reserve.
“He has to earn his place like in any other team,” Arteta said of Jesus afterwards. The essence of this season’s transformation may not be so essential from the start every week, not with the options Arsenal have now amassed. It is a problem the manager will welcome. Arteta had bitten back at suggestions they overcelebrated the win over Bournemouth, suggesting naysayers would be better off in church. As it happened, Jesus’ congregation were given every reason to evangelise beside a field in west London.
