Emi Martinez stepped up to lift the spirits of an 8-year-old boy in hospital on Thursday, despite having a game that same day.
The owner of a barbeque grill page on Instagram was visiting a hospital with his daughter on Thursday when he met another young boy in the bed alongside them. The boy was an Arsenal fan recovering from an operation, but he couldn’t go along to the game against Standard Liege with his father because of the surgery.
The Instagram page owner contacted Emi Martinez to ask if he could send over a ‘get well soon’ message, but the Arsenal man went above and beyond. He recorded a video message for the 8-year-old wishing him well and offering him tickets to a game.
In response to the gesture, the child wrote a message back to Martinez, saying: “Thank you, Martinez, for offering me some tickets and my get well message. It made me really happy and it was really kind of you.”
It’s always nice seeing Arsenal players making use of their position to cheer someone up or help them out. Particularly when the story comes out through the person they helped, rather than the player themselves scheduling a pre-planned social media post about it.
A third clean sheet in three games didn’t do much to harm Martinez’s reputation either, and one Arsenal fan in particular surely enjoyed his new hero helping the Gunners to victory.