With a little help from his friends

ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE: DAVID HYNTER hears how the Arsenal defender got through a rough time and the role his faith plays

ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE: DAVID HYNTERhears how the Arsenal defender got through a rough time and the role his faith plays

FOR EMMANUEL Eboue, the path to salvation was revealed when an expensive car pulled up outside his Hertfordshire home. Out jumped his closest friends at Arsenal, and Kolo Toure, Emmanuel Adebayor and Alex Song were intent on dragging him back towards the light.

Until then, Eboue had locked himself away, with only the darkest thoughts for company. Less than 24 hours earlier, he had sleepwalked off the field at the Emirates Stadium, with the jeers of his team’s fans numbing his senses. The dressingroom was empty, desolate. A quick shower and he headed home. The Ivorian had no wish to return to the club.

That was last December 6th, and it is not a date he will forget in a hurry. Having come on as a substitute for the injured Samir Nasri in the Premier League fixture against Wigan Athletic, out of position at left midfield, he endured a nightmarish afternoon. It was his comeback after a five-week lay-off with a knee injury, but he was short not only on match sharpness. The harder he tried, the worse it became and his misery was completed when he effectively dispossessed Toure then passed to a Wigan player.

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The game was delicately poised at 1-0 and the crowd howled like a pack of wolves. Arsene Wenger decided Eboue had “completely lost his confidence” and had “become a danger” to the team. He felt compelled to substitute him. When the board went up in the 89th minute, the supporters cheered. Eboue describes what happened as “my worst moment in football”. His career at Arsenal flashed before him.

“I went straight home and, when I got there, I didn’t even want to speak with my wife,” he says. She was seven months pregnant with their third child. “I went straight to my bedroom and I closed the door. After some hours like that, I came down to eat but then I went back up to sleep because I was very, very disappointed. The next day, I didn’t want to go back to the training ground.

“But my friends, Kolo Toure, Adebayor and Song, they came to my house. They had tried to call but my phone was off and so they came straight over. They came to me, they helped me. They had me laughing and, from there, I was happy when the other players called me. I say ‘thank you’ to my friends at Arsenal. I will never forget that.”

Eboue is back to his smiling self. The on-pitch concentration that masks his live-wire personality is a long way away when he arrives at a north London primary school on Thursday to help with a lesson on immigration and cultural diversity as part of Arsenal’s “World on our Doorstep” project. The kids are not expecting him and their wide-eyed amazement, before the excitement takes over, offers a heart-warming snap-shot. The Arsenal fans of the future are as yet untouched by cynicism and Eboue ensures that one of them will idolise him for life when he gives him his baseball cap.

He loves children. His third has now been born and it is a measure of the importance of his Christianity to Eboue that his first boy has been given the middle name of “God”.

The 25-year-old is looking forward to tomorrow’s derby at White Hart Lane and the fact he has started eight of Arsenal’s 11 matches since the Wigan episode, albeit that Wenger has been hit hard by injuries, speaks for the strength of his personality.

“I was very nervous in the first game after Wigan,” Eboue says of the Champions League group tie away to Porto. “The boss didn’t want to put me in but I told him: ‘It’s okay, I’m feeling very well.’ I didn’t want to play at first but I saw my teammates and then I went to speak with the boss and he helped me a lot.

“He said to me that if I wanted to be a big player, I had to forget about it, think about the next game and show the fans that I am a good player. I also received a lot of emails from the fans. They said ‘sorry’, because they didn’t want to do that. For me, that was very important.”

At the Estadio do Dragao, the travelling support sang “He comes from Africa/He’s better than Kaka”, while Eboue’s next appearance at the Emirates saw him substituted against Portsmouth to a stirring ovation.

Arsenal have run the gamut of emotions this season, which is perhaps the by-product of Wenger’s blooding of gifted yet raw talents. The pressure, though, has felt unrelenting. No one at the club needs reminding that the FA Cup in 2005 was their last silverware.

“Sometimes, Wenger is very angry with us, but that is normal,” Eboue says. “He is like our dad so we try to make him happy, because at the moment it’s very difficult for him. We know he is going through too much pressure. We try to win for us first and then for him because it’s very, very important for him to win something this year.

“In the Premier League, it’s very difficult at the moment. We will give our best to get into the top four, but, in the Champions League, we believe we can win it. If you play the Champions League final, as we did in 2006, you are capable of winning it.”

Eboue’s participation in that final against Barcelona, when Arsenal were within 14 minutes of an historic triumph, set the seal on his breakthrough season at the club, when he was talked about as one of the finest marauding right-backs in Europe.

When Eboue was 13, he was “absolutely devastated” by the death of his father and he rarely fails to pay his respects when he goes home to Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s capital. “Before that moment, my voice was very clean, but I speak as I do now,” he says, referring to his throaty tones, “because of my father. I cried so much when he died. My wife and my kids make me strong, but when I am in the Ivory Coast, I go to the cemetery to put some flowers on his grave or to clean it. It is a time for reflection.”

When Eboue does that on his career, he can enjoy the archetypal rags-to-riches tale. The boy from a big African family who played barefoot in the streets is representing his nation, together with a clutch of compatriots, on the Premier League stage.

“There’s Drogba and Kalou at Chelsea, Zokora at Tottenham, Meite at West Brom and obviously Kolo at Arsenal,” he says. “I am friends with them all, I’ve known them for a long time and sometimes we go to restaurants in London together. It’s the derby match now and I’ve tried to call Zokora, but when I do, he doesn’t pick up the phone.”

Eboue, by contrast, has endeavoured to answer everyone.

GuardianService