The black marker pen came out inside Manchester City’s dressing room, all of them scribbling messages on Gabriel Jesus’s match ball. Ruben Dias simply wrote ‘Gabrielaaa’. One of the others read ‘Vamos, Pele!’.
High praise, and something accidentally poetic, in mentioning the name of a man ridiculously obsessed with the legacy of his goal record for someone who regularly battles introspection.
Clutching that ball as he bounded out of the Etihad’s front doors, on a day he took his season’s Premier League tally from three to seven, Jesus looked refreshed.
There is a lot going on with him at the moment — he may not be in Manchester for too much longer — but this was an afternoon he could motion up to his private box in celebration at a hat-trick and take the plaudits from a peppy Bernardo Silva at full-time.