‘Grateful’ Emi insists: I’m here for long haul!
EMI Martinez has revealed his desire to remain a big player for Unai Emery and Villa. The World Cup-winning goalkeeper has been linked with a move away in the summer following his heroics for Argentina in Qatar.
Martinez has previously admitted it would be “easy” to opt to join a club in the Champions League.
But the 30-year-old is loving his football at Villa and insisted: “My career went through the roof since I joined the club. I’ve always said I’m grateful to this club and I love being here.
“My family’s happy at the club; my boy is obsessed with playing football and he plays for the under-6s in the academy. We’re loving our time here and hopefully there are many years to come.”
Martinez made his 99th Premier
League appearance for Villa in Saturday’s 3-0 defeat of Bournemouth, chalking up his 33rd clean sheet in the process to take him ahead of Mark Bosnich and Brad Friedel in the club’s record books.
“I was talking to the lads this week, especially defenders, as I couldn’t do it without them,’’ he said. “They’ve been really solid since I joined the club, so I want to thank my teammates for the work they’ve been doing. In the 99 games I’ve played, I couldn’t have done it without them.
“Keeping a clean sheet is a great feeling. If we had won 3-1, I would go home and not be able to sleep for hours because I always think about what I could have done better to keep the clean sheet.
“I’m very ambitious, I’m so driven to improve; I try to transmit that to the back four and to the starting XI. At the end of the day, we keep a clean sheet because Ollie (Watkins) is pressing good, Emi (Buendia) is running back and forward – it’s a team effort.”
Meanwhile, former Villa coach Neil Cutler has revealed how close the club came to overlooking Martinez before finally sanctioning his £18 million transfer.
Martinez was relatively unknown prior to arriving from Arsenal in September 2020. He struggled to secure first-team football with the Gunners and was sent out on loan to multiple EFL clubs. In the summer of 2020, Cutler was part of conversations with sporting director Johan Lange and members of the scouting department over bringing in a new keeper. Martinez’s stats were not outstanding but Cutler argued they did not tell the full story.
“Johan and the scouts would mainly go off stats, like clean sheets and save percentages, but Emi was somewhere lower down that list because he hadn’t played many games, compared to the other keepers across Europe we were looking at,’’ he said. “Luckily, they were open to my ideas and how I work – I look at a keeper’s style and shape, and Emi’s bio-mechanics were excellent, he ticked every box.
“Trying to convince people to spend £18m on a goalkeeper who has not played much first-team football was not easy, but I did it. I put on a PowerPoint presentation, showing what he would bring, including his character.
“Then it was a case of me selling the club to Emi, and I had so many conversations with him over the phone, telling him what I do and how, and what, we would achieve together.
“He knew I would go above and beyond to make him better, which was the same approach he had. He felt that connection straight away and he was like, ‘that’s it, I am coming to Villa’.
“In the end he was chased by quite a few other clubs but he was a man of his word.”