Gabriel Martinelli reveals apology to Conor Bradley as he explains actions after controversial shove | OneFootball

Gabriel Martinelli revealed he messaged Conor Bradley to apologise after shoving him while the Liverpool player was down injured, admitting he did not realise the severity of the injury at the time.

The lack of action in either goal has caused Martinelli’s late shove to become one of the main talking points from Arsenal’s 0-0 draw with Liverpool and the Brazilian has come in for some harsh criticism.

As Bradley chased a ball, his leg landed awkwardly in the turf and his knee gave way, resulting in an injury that required him to be stretchered off and leave the stadium on crutches.

But tempers flared when Martinelli first dropped the ball on Bradley and then attempted to push him off the pitch in order for the game to restart.

Martinelli was angrily met by the Liverpool players before being handed a yellow for his actions and has now revealed he messaged Bradley to apologise.

On his Instagram, Martinelli wrote: “Conor and I have messaged and I have already apologised to him.

“I really didn’t understand he was seriously injured in the heat of the moment.

“I want to say I’m deeply sorry for reacting.

“Sending Conor all my best again for a quick recovery.”

Before Martinelli’s message, his manager Mikel Arteta leapt to his defence and suggested the Brazilian was unaware of what had happened but did say he would have a word with him about his actions in the future.

“He probably doesn’t know [that Bradley was injured],” Arteta said.

“I don’t know what happened to Conor but hopefully he is OK. But obviously there is no intention from Gabi to do anything bad to him.

“Knowing Gabi, if anybody knows Gabi, he’s an incredible, lovely guy, and probably he didn’t realise what happened.

“I will have a word with him now to understand that, but probably he didn’t recognise what happened.”

Liverpool manager Arne Slot was also reasonably understanding, saying Martinelli’s actions were a result of time-wasting antics in the game.

“I don’t know Gabriel Martinelli but he comes across as a nice guy,” Slot said.

“The problem for him, and it’s a problem in general in football, is that there is so much time-wasting in the final parts of games that sometimes you can be annoyed when you want to score a goal and you feel a player is pretending to be injured.

“I’m 100 per cent sure if he knew what the injury might be, he wouldn’t do that. But it doesn’t look great if he has the injury, which we fear he might have, of course.

“Football, time-wasting, diving has come to a situation that players think in the 94th minute that probably it’s happening again, because I’ve seen it happening against us so many times this season.

“I can understand that Martinelli might have thought that this was time-wasting as well.”