Gabriel Jesus is a football writer’s dream. I mean sure he’s obviously an extremely talented youngster, scoring three goals and assisting two while managing to keep Sergio Aguero out of the team is impressive but truly his name is the best thing about the Brazilian. We’ve had plenty of footballers with the first name of Jesus, his team mate Jesus Navas springs to mind, but to have a player whose surname is in fact Jesus truly is a rare thing.
The obvious attraction of having the name Jesus is that when the Man City star scores it allows commentators to scream ‘Jesus’ at the top of their lungs and no one is thinking that the commentator has perhaps gone a little over the top. But the name Jesus means the jokes about Gabriel Jesus are almost endless. Starting off we have the classic ‘Gabriel Jesus can perform miracles on the football pitch.’ Now obviously this is referring to Gabriel’s football ability as opposed to him genuinely being able to turn the goal posts to wine like the bloke from the bible allegedly did.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. While ‘Jesus healed the paralyzed man’ is probably not going to be a newspaper headline ‘The I’ this morning ran with ‘Jesus saves City’ so it’s already clear the press are milking the whole Gabriel Jesus name thing for all its work. A good headline following his dramatic late winner would be something along the lines of ‘Jesus is City’s messiah.’ You can interchange messiah and saviour but the point still stands.
Perhaps if Gabriel Jesus goes on to have a slump in form but then scores a hat trick a ‘Second Coming of Jesus’ headline will be all over the back pages. There are also the various cross related jokes as well. With Jesus Navas the joke was that he always could not cross (which is true, his end product is still poor) and I imagine something similar might be said about Gabriel Jesus although currently he’s showing that he can in fact cross, he’s got two assists.
I think it is important to bear in mind just what a phenomenal young player Gabriel Jesus is. I’m sure he’s already been pinned down as the heir to Neymar’s throne and if his first few games in England are anything to go by then Gabriel Jesus has the potential to become one of the best strikers in Europe. Will he achieve this goal? I’m afraid only time will tell.