Reyes at home in spotlight

When he arrived in London, on a cold, dingy Tuesday, he was all jokes publicly. “Ozú, qué frío (Blimey, this place is cold)!” he laughed as he stepped off the plane. “I can see only clouds here,” he winked when asked if he was going to be a star.

His private mood was quite different. “That first week . . . ” he begins, “I prefer not to think back to it, it is such a bad memory. I was without everyone, my family. I couldn’t stand it.

“The first day was hell. It was the weather, the shock, the food . . . a bit of everything really. I was three hours in the car getting here ’s training ground at London Colney from the airport. It was snowing. It was awful. I’d only just got here and it snowed for three hours. Terrible. The English traffic was really slow.”

Reyes had gone, as normal, to training at his former club, Sevilla, that morning. “Bye!” he sang as he left the villa he shared with Francisco and Mariana, his parents, Jesus, his elder brother, and Reme, his girlfriend. “See you at lunch.”

He knew the previous evening that Arsenal had opened transfer talks but did not expect anything imminent. When he stepped off the training pitch, his agent called — the deal was on and he was to go straight to the airport. He did so in tears. He had time just to call home briefly.

His mother said she would pray for him. No wonder he felt cold in London: there was no time to pack even one jumper or jacket. His first night in England was spent with just the four walls of a lonely hotel room for company.

There was no sleep. The next day it was back to London Colney for a 6am medical.

Though Reyes was shy and spoke no English, it quickly became obvious to Arsenal that their new signing had a problem. He was 20, homesick and lost. With the decisiveness and vision that typifies how things are done on the playing side under Arsène Wenger, a Spanish-speaking minder was found and employed on a full-time basis immediately. Eight months on and Xandy, a bright young Anglo-Mallorcan, is still at Reyes’s side for any help he needs with language or logistics, 24 hours a day.

Most crucially, arrangements were made to fly out his mum, dad, brother and girlfriend within the week. “We got them all here on the first plane we could,” he said, “and immediately I felt much better.”

Jesus has since returned to Seville after getting married, and Reyes misses him terribly, but he now lives with the rest of his clan in a large house in Cockfosters, where the decor is vivid and Andalucian. Mariana cooks Sevillano food every night and the television is permanently tuned — except when it is time to watch British sports programmes — to Spanish satellite channels. “Life ’s great now. We might be in England, but we have a little corner of Spain. We’re eating plenty of Spanish food and the only problem, still, is the language. But now . . . well, I consider myself half-Andaluz, half-English.” There is much laughter.

“Sportsmen need their families,” Reyes says, “and that’s especially true for me. I don’t talk about any success I have as a footballer. What I get a kick out of is that I’ve brought a lot of success to my family. It’s my family’s success, not mine. Any son is simply a reflection of his mum and dad.”

It is a very Andalucian sentiment, but one with particular truth for Reyes.

He tells the story of Villega. He was a famous youth prospect at Sevilla, a year older than Reyes and, so the legend goes, even better. He was voted best young European player at 13. “He was a friend and he came from my home town, Utrera, but he didn’t quite have the same support. For one reason or another, his parents just couldn’t be there for him the way mine were.

“He went to training on different days to me. If we’d gone on the same day, my mum and dad would have taken him along and looked after him, but because he didn’t have someone there, he eventually dropped out. There are lots of young kids who’ve got talent and ability in the Seville area, but the problem is Seville’s a town to party in and there are lots of chances to go out and have a good time. There are two paths , and a lot of kids who are good at 16 or 17 go the wrong way, but I had my parents for discipline. Fortunately — thanks to God — I chose the right path.”

The young Reyes nonetheless had plenty of the tearaway in him when he started training with Sevilla at the age of nine. He had long hair, wild eyes and the look of a street kid. He found it so hard to articulate himself that coaches wondered if he were mute. Utrera, 20 miles east of Seville, is an industrial place and the Reyeses lived in Arenal, one of the town’s poorer barrios, in a bare house with a leaky roof. Francisco took the bus to work so Mariana could use the family car to pick Jose up after school and drive him to training. The humble origins, the brilliant kid, the strong, battling family — it is a Spanish Wayne Rooney story.

The myth even went that Reyes was so rough he could not read or write, and Sevilla had to help with his education. “Don’t you believe it,” he grins. “Studies — that’s something you have to take care of yourself. It wasn’t Sevilla’s job to help me. I actually studied at a Salesian priests’ school. Bloody hell. Priests. They were hard as nails.

“Football was all I thought of. I always carried a ball with me and whenever the teacher had to leave the class to do something, I’d bring it out and start playing in the classroom.”

Even now, Sandy confides, Reyes will get back to Cockfosters after a training session and get his ball out and suggest a kickabout in the back garden. They tell at Sevilla of the time Reyes was 17 and broke his toe. Joaquin Caparros, his coach, had to stop him playing in his plaster-cast. “It was my first pre-season with the first team,” Reyes yelps in self-defence.

JUST as there is a television permanently tuned to a foreign station in the Reyes’s living room in Cockfosters, so there is one chez Wenger in Totteridge. Hour after hour of football footage from far-off places is devoured by the Arsenal manager. In spring 2003, Wenger believed he was close to a deal to sign an Iberian whizkid he had watched obsessively on satellite channels: Cristiano Ronaldo. When Manchester United gazumped him, there was no panic. Wenger knew of another one just as good.

The problem, as Wenger closed in on Reyes, was that the youngster was doing too well. A coruscating debut for Spain against Portugal last September added a couple of million euros to his valuation and, soon after, he destroyed Real Madrid in a 4-1 victory over the Castillan giants by Sevilla. Zinedine Zidane was so bewildered by Reyes’s speed around the pitch that he asked him if, somewhere between his legs, there wasn’t an invisible motorbike.

When Wenger finally got his man, Reyes’s price had jumped to £17.5m. With the financial commitment of Ashburton Grove hanging over Arsenal, the manager first had to persuade his board to outlay such a fee. The second job was to get Sevilla to agree to the payment schedule, which meant Arsenal spending just £7.1m up front, with £3.5m due in 2005 and the rest subject to performance targets and appearances. Sevilla fans gathered to abuse Jose Maria del Nido, the club’s president, when news came through and lined the streets as Reyes made his way to the airport. They bashed on his bonnet and, tearfully, shouted: “Don’t go!” Reyes, a debutant for Sevilla aged 16 and lifelong Sevillista, was also in tears.

Was it not brave in the extreme for this most homespun of boys to move to London? “Not really,” he says. “It was a terrible time, those first weeks, but in football you try to improve yourself step by step and I knew coming to Arsenal gave me the chance to take several steps at once. In these situations you have to get the strength to keep going from within yourself.

“It’s true I got on really well with the Sevilla fans, but now I love Arsenal and they are giving me everything. I used to watch a lot of English football as a kid, but Arsenal were always the ones I loved. When a train like that comes into town you can’t afford not to be on it.”

In 21 appearances last season, Reyes’s talent was evident and he answered affirmatively the first question for any foreigner coming into the Premiership: could he handle the buffeting from English defenders? Reyes is small, but determined and wiry — a close-season weights programme prescribed by Wenger has brought his bulk up to nearly 13st. “I’ve managed to survive everything on the field but I’d like to put that down to the efforts of everyone at Arsenal who’s helped me, organising time in the gym to make me work on building up my strength.”

So far Wenger looks to be shrewd in predicting that, with Reyes settled and stronger, this would be his season. “Six months is enough for any player to adapt,” says Reyes. “I’ve had my six months, and now it’s time to prove myself.”

Though he was often a winger for Sevilla, Wenger sees him as a second striker. “It’s my favourite position. The manager gives me freedom on the pitch and it’s a great feeling. He gives that to all of the players and I think you can see that in the way we express ourselves as a team when we’re playing.

“Right now I’m learning a lot from being alongside Thierry (Henry). The thing he’s really teaching me at the moment is how to hold the ball up and bring others into play. In five years (Reyes is contracted until 2008) I should be able to learn a whole lot more from such a great player as him.”

Who could relish facing such a strike force? “At Arsenal we want to do well in the League again and win it of course, but the one thing we want to improve on is Europe. Once we’ve won the Champions League we will have achieved everything as a team — and I think this year is going to be the year for that.”

There is a touch of alegria behind so bold a prediction. But this, for Arsenal, is a time of miracles, and of shining, happy Reyes.