I'm adapting to being a striker - I'm a battler and don't back down'

Mikel Merino on being Arsenal's emergency No 9, facing Real Madrid in the Champions League and chasing more Spain success.

- By Sid Lowe

Mikel Merino sits in a briefing room on the second floor of Spain's Las Rozas headquarters, an A1 tactics sheet covering the table. Felt tip in hand, he is making his way up the paper pitch, neatly marking the positions he has occupied, starting out in goal at school. "No more: I have to protect my shoulder now," he begins, laughing. "I've been a left-sided centre-back. At Dortmund I played there in a three. And in a back four, in the Spain Under-21s. I've played as a No 6... I've played as a No 8... I've played as a No 10... as a kid, I played here, on the right wing..."

There's a grin. "And now," Merino says, applying a perfectly timed pause before drawing another cross. "Now I'm playing here."

Seven positions, impeccably spaced on the page, but which does he prefer? "Pfff, I don't know. Lately, I like this one," he replies, tapping the final mark, near the opposition's penalty area, and cracking up again. "You know, I'm getting a taste for it."

Since the Arsenal midfielder became the Arsenal striker, he has scored more than Harry Kane, Lautaro Martinez and Erling Haaland and, told that now, he is laughing again. "The beauty of stats is you can present them the way that makes you look good," he says but it's not just stats. Ian Wright described him as the No 9 the club needed and Ian Wright, he knows, "isn't just anyone". Maybe it's genetic, somewhere inside: Merino's father Miguel-Angel was a striker whose most famous goal, and celebration, he emulated at the European Championship. Staff saw something in him, certainly. Even if they didn't tell him that.