Pilates, secret night swims, THOSE penalty histrionics and lewd gestures after the World Cup win... inside the wild world of ultimate villain Emiliano Martinez, as he signs huge new £200k-a-week deal

Casual as you like, Emiliano Martinez delivers the killer line. Flanked by Aston Villa chiefs Damian Vidagany and Monchi, Martinez has just announced to about 350 supporters that he has signed a new five-year contract with the club.

The Argentine has already been serenaded with Holte End favourite ‘Emi Martinez, the world’s number one!’ and is in no mood to argue. ‘I became the best in the world here,’ he says, as breezily as if recalling what he has eaten for breakfast.

Asked about Saturday's meeting with Arsenal, who sold him to Villa for just £17million four years ago, Martinez describes it as ‘just another game’. He points out that he has played in a World Cup Final, just in case anyone has forgotten.

Never underestimate how hard Martinez worked to lift the trophy. ‘Emi gave everything to reach that World Cup, and also to win it,’ says Neil Cutler, his former goalkeeping coach at Villa. ‘He has got his own nutritionist, yoga and Pilates teacher and I’ve known him to go swimming in the middle of the night just to recover for the next game.

‘When he was beaten by a deflection in a game, he would get so annoyed. I would say ‘Emi, you can’t save it’ but he hated letting goals in. So we gave him a rebound net, which sent the ball off at different angles, so he could work on transferring his weight quickly.’

Observing Martinez, perched on a high stool in Villa’s revamped club shop with dozens of ‘Martinez 23’ shirts behind him, the mind drifts to a similar scene 20 years ago, 100 miles to the south.

‘Please don’t call me arrogant because what I say is true,’ said the man at the top table. ‘I am European champion, so I am not one of the bottle. I think I am a special one,’ With that, Jose Mourinho wrote himself into Premier League legend before he had even taken charge of a game as Chelsea manager.

Martinez is 2004 Mourinho in goalkeeper form. Utterly confident in his own ability and unafraid to say so. Ready to push the boundaries as far as possible to gain an edge, particularly in penalty shoot-outs. Loved by those on his side; feared, disliked and grudgingly admired by opponents. Both conductors of their orchestra. John McGinn wears the armband for Villa, but Martinez is without doubt the team’s natural leader.

Mourinho is a magnet for controversy and Martinez is the same. With hundreds of millions of eyes on him, he performed a lewd gesture with the Golden Glove he had just won for being the 2022 World Cup’s best goalkeeper. This was the greatest day of Martinez’s career and his antics, from that moment to the graceless mockery of Kylian Mbappe, were ludicrous. Some in the game even believe they may have cost him a move to one of Europe’s elite clubs.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you Martinez has only ever had eyes for Villa, either. Mail Sport understands that top clubs in Europe were sounded out discreetly after the World Cup to see whether they might bid. There were even those who thought Martinez’s friendship with Lionel Messi might pave the way for a move, given the esteem in which Messi is held worldwide.

Yet there was never a bite. The big three in Spain had top-class goalkeepers, Paris St Germain was never an option after the jousting with Mbappe, and neither Manchester United nor Chelsea fancied paying the world-record price for a goalkeeper Villa would have demanded. More fool them, because Martinez is a goalkeeper of the very highest class.

As well as being an inspirational leader, he is a devoted family man. Martinez has the cuddly toys of his children, son Santi’s penguin and daughter Ava’s giraffe, as lucky mascots before every game. He speaks English fluently, with a hint of a London accent from his decade at Arsenal, and is described as ‘a lovely guy’ and ‘a proper gentleman’.

The spiky streak is never far from the surface though. Martinez loves settling scores and the chance to do so against the club who overlooked him is too good to resist.

‘I don’t apologise [for it],’ said Martinez about his antics. ‘I don’t swear. I don’t insult anyone. I just try to help my team – that’s all. I never insult any religion, any player. I never try to wind fans up. I just try to slow things down when the game is against us. If you keep yourself steady and you don’t insult any religion, any mother, I think you can do whatever you want. I don’t cross a line, I never do. I respect families and countries and I will never cross that line.’

 

The evening was drawing to a close and a group of managers were chewing over one of football’s most fascinating topics: What makes a great goalkeeper?

The bosses had gathered for a dinner in honour of the late Craig Brown, who had recently announced his retirement from football. Eventually, the most successful among them offered his opinion: ‘Just one who keeps the ball out of the net.’

Rotherham manager Steve Evans takes up the story. ‘When Sir Alex Ferguson said that you remembered how simple it is,’ he reflects. ‘I don’t like picking World XIs but it’s hard to imagine one without Emi in it.’

Evans should know. Mail Sport understands Martinez’s new deal is worth more than £200,000 a week – a huge rise from the £120,000 he had been earning. But when Evans first met him, at Sopwell House Hotel in Hertfordshire in early 2015, Martinez had been at Arsenal for nearly five years and had itchy feet.

‘I left him at 9pm at Sopwell House and at 9am the next morning he was in the office at Rotherham, waiting for the paperwork to arrive so he could sign it and train,’ Evans recounts.

‘I’ve signed goalkeepers on loan since then who don’t have the name or fame of Emi but who have come from big clubs,’ says Evans. ‘They’ve moaned about the pitches, the food, the travelling.

‘Not Emi. He bought into us straightaway. He wasn’t happy if he conceded in training and he brought a real focus to the people in front of him. He would dig people out.’

Rotherham stayed in the Championship that year and Martinez’s relentless has now focus driven Villa to the Champions League. ‘I love his mentality,’ stresses Unai Emery. ‘He demands a lot of himself and he is showing how good he is. I am very happy when he is thinking 100 per cent about Aston Villa.’

The work ethic has never deserted him, nor the fury when he concedes, which is reminiscent of the great former Everton goalkeeper Neville Southall.

‘His desire to keep the ball out of the net is the best I’ve ever seen,’ says former Villa goalkeeping coach Neil Cutler, who is now at Wolves. ‘I used to have to drag him off the pitch as I was worried he’d get injured. “Come on, Emi, you’re done.”

‘But he wanted to stay out there five more minutes, just face one more shot, one more penalty.’ Ah, yes. Penalties. Martinez’s speciality.

Nobody who saw it will forget the way Martinez preyed on the nerves of the French kickers during the World Cup Final shoot-out.

As Aurelien Tchouameni walked forward, Martinez tossed the ball away instead of handing it to the referee, which forced the Real Madrid midfielder to make a detour to collect it. Inevitably, Tchouameni shot wide. He also saved from Kingsley Coman and that pretty much sealed it.

Yet Martinez was already a dab hand at these sorts of mind games. Rewind to Old Trafford, September 25, 2021. Villa lead 1-0 but Manchester United have a penalty in stoppage time.

‘We wondered if Cristiano Ronaldo would take it but then Bruno Fernandes took the ball,’ remembers Cutler. ‘Emi was straight at him, saying “You’re no good. I want to save one from Ronaldo, not you.”

‘We had worked hard on penalties and we knew Fernandes could lose his cool in certain situations. He put it over the bar. Emi got inside his head and he can gain an edge by pushing the limit – but never too far.’

Martinez would practise against Ollie Watkins and Douglas Luiz at the end of sessions at Villa’s Bodymoor Heath training ground. ‘I think I’ve lost only one shootout in my career,’ Martinez explains. ‘The top strikers don’t really get nervous and when you see one in front of you, you think “Oof, I need to push myself.”

‘Maybe they see me in goal and they know I’m a penalty saver, maybe they think they need to put it a little bit wider or higher, maybe they miss. Sometimes you need to have a little bit of luck but it is something that comes from within you.’

The goalkeeper’s water bottle, with its dizzying lists of penalty-takers’ habits, is a symbol of the modern shoot-out but Martinez prefers more basic methods. ‘When he first came to Villa, we’d watch penalties in detail – which way do they go, where is the standing foot, do they have a flailing arm,’ reveals Cutler. ‘But in the end Emi said “I go off how I feel.” The stuff we worked on was more technical, like diving from the middle of the goal to get beyond the post.’

‘I’ve never seen a keeper who could jump as high as he did,’ admits Dave Edwards, who played with Martinez during the Argentine’s loan spell at Wolves in 2015-16. ‘Whether he dived right or left, he could get right up to the bar. And his kicking was incredible.’

Martinez’s loan spells taught him to adapt to various dressing rooms and he is now as comfortable with Messi, who has become a close friend, as he is with Rotherham’s third-choice right-back or Villa’s junior keepers.

It is early in the season and the Wolves squad are simmering with resentment. Popular goalkeeper Carl Ikeme has been jettisoned and replaced by a lad from Arsenal who has made fewer than 50 senior appearances.

‘There was a bit of unrest,’ recalls Edwards. ‘Everyone respected Carl so much and we knew Emi wasn’t coming to be a No2. So it was a bit difficult but Emi was a lovely guy – so personable, and you could see how much he wanted to be part of the club. You don’t always see that from loan players.

‘On his debut against QPR, we lost 3-2 and he was at fault for two of the goals – errors he would never make again. But he bounced back from it really strongly.’

Even though Martinez took Ikeme’s place, the former Molineux keeper does not have a bad word for his ex-colleague. ‘I knew how much more of a talented goalkeeper he w as than me,’ Ikeme concedes. ‘But he’s such a lovely guy. I can’t say enough nice things about him. He was confident and determined but he had a great personality – a proper gentleman.’

So little-known was Martinez during his first loan spell, at Oxford in 2012, that he was addressed as ‘Damian’ – his first name which he never uses - rather than his middle name, ‘Emiliano’. Yet by the time he had made it to Rotherham, Emi knew the drill.

‘We went to games in club blazers during my first spell at Rotherham,’ explains Evans. ‘Emi was due to be measured for his on the Monday, but we had a game on the Saturday before.

‘He walked into my office in a blazer that was two sizes too small. This was a guy who had played for Arsenal but his attitude was that if the other lads were wearing it, so was he. He was humble. Footballers at elite level can be dismissive. You wonder “Is that the same kid as three or four years ago?” Emi is the same kid he was nine or 10 years ago.’

If his six loan spells shaped Martinez the man, then the sessions at Bodymoor made him the player he is today.

Martinez’s save from France striker Randal Kolo Muani in the last minute of extra-time in the World Cup Final was one of the greatest in history as it ensured the match went to penalties and helped Argentina win their third title.

‘If I blast a ball at your face, you’ll move your head,’ says Cutler. ‘With Emi we’d worked for months on hand position, reacting to the ball, not moving his head or shoulders until the last minute. All that work paid off in that moment.

‘When he arrived he was quiet. Rounded shoulders. But you could see how much he cared so it was about getting him to show that on the pitch. Show that touch of arrogance. We looked into the psychology of it. Show people you believe you’re the best.’

Martinez has no doubts about that now – and neither do those who have accompanied him on the journey.

‘He’s the No1 Arsenal have been craving for years,’ says Edwards. ‘They sold him for £17m – he’s worth more than £100m now.’

‘Arsenal don’t make many mistakes but I think there’s an acceptance there that they made one with Emi,’ agrees Evans. ‘He was never the golden boy at Arsenal and they realised too late how good he was,’ adds Ikeme.

It still smarts with the 31-year-old that Arsenal never gave him a proper chance and sold him even though he helped them win the FA Cup and Community Shield. You suspect it also needles Martinez that Gunners keeper David Raya was named in the PFA Team of the Year ahead of him.

‘Just another game’? Pull the other one, Emi.