Arsenal forward Gabriel Martinelli was branded “disgraceful” after trying to push injured Liverpool player Conor Bradley off the pitch near the end of their 0-0 Premier League draw.<\/p>\n
Bradley fell awkwardly near the touchline in stoppage time and Martinelli clearly thought he was time-wasting, throwing the ball at him before manhandling him.<\/p>\n
Liverpool’s players reacted angrily and after the ensuing melee, Martinelli and Liverpool’s Ibrahima Konate were booked.<\/p>\n
Northern Ireland full-back Bradley was eventually taken off the field on a stretcher in obvious distress. There are fears he has injured his ACL, with scans to come.<\/p>\n
Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville said Martinelli’s actions had left him fuming.<\/p>\n
“You cannot do that. That is so poor. I think an apology is needed,” the former Manchester United defender said.<\/p>\n
“Bradley is being stretchered off. I’m fuming with Martinelli, to be honest. Disgraceful. I’m surprised a Liverpool player hasn’t gone over and whacked Martinelli there!”<\/p>\n
Fellow pundit Roy Keane also criticised the Brazilian forward.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t like it. It’s happened to me when I was badly injured and a player stood over me, and it’s not good \u2026 I’m surprised the Liverpool players didn’t react to Martinelli more. I think that behaviour is an absolute disgrace. Not good scenes,” Keane said.<\/p>\n
Martinelli said on social media he had apologised to Bradley and was not aware of the extent of his injury at the time.<\/p>\n
Liverpool manager Arne Slot said he “feared the worst” for Bradley, although he was measured in his criticism of Martinelli.<\/p>\n
“I am 100 per cent sure that if he knew what the injury might be, he wouldn’t do that,” the Dutchman said.<\/p>\n
“But it doesn’t look great if Bradley has the injury we think he has.<\/p>\n
“You don’t like to see a player being moved if he might have an injury.”<\/p>\n
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta said Martinelli would never have tried to move Bradley if he thought he was injured.<\/p>\n
“Probably he doesn’t know because knowing Gabi, there is zero intention,” the Spaniard said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know what happened to Conor, but hopefully it’s not bad. But, obviously, there is no intention from Gabi to do anything bad to him.”<\/p>\n
Reuters\/ABC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arsenal forward Gabriel Martinelli was branded “disgraceful” after trying to push injured Liverpool player Conor Bradley off the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[22261,3361,64,63,213260,596,6226,1613,1614,85],"class_list":["post-401027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-arne-slot","tag-arsenal","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-connor-bradley","tag-football","tag-gabriel-martinelli","tag-liverpool","tag-premier-league","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}