Arsenal: Why can’t they all be like Lucas Torreira?

Lucas Torreira has been a fantastic servant to Arsenal, and after seeing the Europa League final, I want to know why they can’t all be like him.

Arsenal’s loss against Chelsea epitomized the biggest problem with this club. There is a negative mindset epidemic, where when one thing goes wrong, you might as well call the match, because the Gunners cannot recover.

They make one mistake, and all of a sudden, everyone loses heart, they count the match as lost, and everyone puts on their best pouty face. When they get subbed off, they hang their heads and look like a child, told that he can’t play any more video games.

It’s a big problem, and it was prevalent again against Chelsea. Unless, of course, your name is Lucas Torreira, in which case this awful match was cause for an actual reaction – tears, sorrow, misery. I haven’t seen a player wear his heart on his sleeve like that since… well, it’s been awhile.

This isn’t the first time this season that I’ve asked this question, which is just a testament to the quality of this young man. That he is so invested in himself and in his teammates and in this team as a whole that to get subbed off when his team had clearly failed, he just couldn’t take it.

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For the past five years or so, we’ve been asking questions – why do the players not seem to care? Mesut Ozil was always the worst of the bunch, but he wasn’t the only guilty party. Plenty of players look like they’re just going through the motions while the club crumbles around them.

Part of last summer involved investing in players with fight. Players that cared. And for the record, they did a great job – Matteo Guendouzi and Sokratis both have emotional styles as well. But Lucas Torreira is in another league.

And no, it’s not just because he cried. It’s because you can see in the way he plays that he is personally affected by mistakes, or by ineffectiveness. He may not yet be good enough to turn a match around, or he may not be assertive enough to call for more from his teammates, but if all of our players had the desire of Torreira, we would be in a much different spot.

So keep him, start him always, and use him as a model for the type of player to purchase this summer.