Martin Ødegaard exudes captain’s cool as he refuses to let Arsenal wilt

L ast year, Martin Ødegaard returned to Drammen, the small town in Norway where he grew up. He went back to the pitch where he learned to play and found that the gravel surface he remembered had been replaced with artificial grass. The kids kicking a ball about on the pitch, he observed, didn’t seem as committed as he had been. In his day, these games had really mattered.

The tone couldn’t have been more middle-aged. Of course things were better in his day, of course they were tougher. They didn’t have these fancy facilities and it didn’t do them any harm, did it? Ødegaard might be the oldest 24‑year‑old in the world. Some prodigies never grow up: Theo Walcott, Anthony Martial and Jack Butland still feel as though they’re in their late teens, just waiting to explode into the full majesty suggested by their potential. Others feel as though they go overnight from prospect to elder statesman.

It is eight years since Ødegaard, clad in a striped top he had grabbed from his bedroom floor, hair uncombed, weary from the flight, was whisked straight from the airport to a press conference at which he was presented as a Real Madrid player. He seems to have been around for an eternity, plays with an elegant maturity, and yet this is only his third full season of football for a club in one of Europe’s top six leagues.

While others might have lost their heads amid a frenetic opening at St James’ Parkon Sunday, he retained his composure and slowly wrested the game his way. It’s not just his passing, although that is obviously exceptional; or his goals, of which he now has 15 this season; it’s the air of authority he projects. The result is that there is a glow in the embers of Arsenal’s title challenge yet and that it is not, as it