Arsenal: ‘Humility’ a weird but wonderful Lucas Torreira description

Unai Emery has praised Lucas Torreira’s humility after an excellent performance in Arsenal’s 5-1 win over Fulham. It is a strange characteristic to highlight, but also a wonderful one.

Lucas Torreira put in his best performance of the season on Sunday afternoon. Away from home, playing in a two-man midfield against a speedy and dangerous opposition, still adapting to the league and new teammates. This would have been the time for a lesser player to find himself overwhelmed. But not Torreira.

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The scrappy Uruguayan was phenomenal. Piercing the heart of the midfield, he was like one of those automated hoovers that sweep around a dirty restaurant floor, sucking up all the rubbish and collecting it in a big old bin bag.

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Torreira made more interceptions than any Arsenal player has in a single game this season. He scrapped, he battled, he threw himself about the pitch, and he also played with an increasing quality and confidence on the ball that shows that he is more than a game-breaking scrapper.

After the match, Unai Emery was keen to heap the praise on the club’s latest attempted solution to providing balance to an often overworked and lopsided midfield. But not quite in the way that you might expect. Here is what he said:

"“He’s very young, it’s his first season here at this level but he was playing in Italy which is a very hard competition also. He is playing also with his national team, against big teams. Here, I think with his process he’s doing very well. The first is his humility to work every day, to listen, to learn. He is playing today in the middle, then right in the 4-4-2 and his performance is the same. I think his career is just starting and we want to do it with him, he can do it with us, giving us and giving him the best performances at the best level.”"

Praising a player’s humility, a characteristic that is, in its totality, intangible, immeasurable, and, in some people’s opinion, invisible, is a little odd. There were plenty of other elements of Torreira’s performance, character or future that Emery could have picked out. But he didn’t. He chose to highlight Torreira’s humility.

I think is wonderful. Humility is a trait that is rarely seen in modern sport. It is about being big, brash, bold. Boxing demands its fighters to market themselves to garner interest. Sprinters strut their stuff before they are called to the blocks. NFL players will celebrate something as little as a successful tackle, crossing their arms and staring down their opposition, asserting their apparent greatness.

Being humble is not celebrated. Being humble is equated with being soft, a pushover, lacking fight or resilience or a will to win. But it isn’t any of those things. It is merely recognising one’s position in the team and working hard to fulfil the responsibilities of that position. And there is no one in this squad that does it better than Torreira. That is what Emery means.

It sounds weird, in modern football, to praise a player’s humility. But in Torreira’s case, it is a wonderful description of one of his best assets. It’s what makes him the player that he is and what makes him the perfect midfielder for Arsenal. A solution may finally have been found, and it’s a humble one.