Santi Cazorla recalls agonising TV analysis with Mikel Arteta, loving life playing for boyhood club Oviedo after demanding to be paid minimum wage and how Arsenal CAN win the Premier League title

It sounds like something you might see on reality TV show Gogglebox – Mikel Arteta and Santi Cazorla sat on the couch together watching Premier League football.

Cazorla sets the scene from 2016: ‘I used to watch games with him when we were both injured,’ he says. ‘He would get hold of the remote control and freeze the action and I would say to him: “What are you stopping it for?”

‘He would rewind it 30 seconds more, pause it again, and say: “What do you see? I would say: “I see the action frozen. I don’t see anything!”'

Arteta would be pointing out a badly positioned player, a defensive line that was too low, or a movement that one team had made to open up space.

‘I would look at him and think, this guy has already started being a coach,’ says Cazorla, not the least bit surprised that his pal is now in charge of Arsenal’s best shot at a league title in 20 years.

‘With so much stopping and rewinding the game would have finished and we would only be at minute 35,’ he laughs. ‘It’s a gift to see the things he sees, because I know I don’t focus on them.’

The odd couple would finally get to the end of matches because Cazorla developed the perfect strategy: ‘I would say yes to everything! He’d question me and I’d say: “Yes you’re completely right now press play and lets see if we can finish watching the match!"’

Cazorla is 39 now and back at his boyhood club Oviedo trying to get them promoted back to the first division - an achievement he says that would top everything else in his career.

He agreed to join them last summer but only if the club would pay him no more than a minimum wage and with 10 per cent of his shirt sales going straight to the academy.

‘I would play for free but [league rules mean] you have to accept the minimum or you can’t play at all. I want to contribute to the club growing,’ he says.

It’s been rewarding and in ways he might not have imagined.

‘Opposition players remember my time with the national team and Arsenal and they see me playing in the second division and they thank me for it,’ he says. ‘And the slightest kick they give me, they say sorry. That never used to happen!’

They all want his shirt too. ‘Sadly I can’t give them to everyone because I only have two per game. They even write to me during the week now on Instagram. There’s a moment when the game starts and I say “but five of you have asked and I only have two”.’

Asked to look back across his career and pick a five-a-side team of players he has played with he reels off Andres Iniesta, Xavi, David Silva, Juan Riquelme and Mesut Ozil without too much pondering.

‘We’re not going to defend!’ he says. ‘They’ll have to take the ball off us, but if they do we’ll suffer. I like the ball players and they’re five who have made an impact on me.’

There’s a young player at Arsenal who wouldn’t be out of place in that team. ‘I love [Martin] Odegaard,’ Cazorla says. ‘He wanted to be an important player somewhere and at Arsenal he has found that. I see myself in him because when I went to Arsenal I found a coach, in Arsene Wenger, who had so much faith in me. The second season he made me captain almost before I knew how to say hello in English!’

He’s a fan of Declan Rice too. ‘I saw him at West Ham and loved him. He’s the typical box-to-box as they say in England. He reminds me of Aaron Ramsay when I was at Arsenal – a player who will appear in so many parts of the pitch that sometimes you think: what’s this guy doing here, when he should be there! But he has such an engine.’

Can this Odegaard-Rice powered Arsenal win the league under Arteta? ‘Yes,’ is Cazorla’s emphatic answer. ‘The year Leicester won the league I think we reached the mid-point of the season with a seven-point lead. We lost it because of a lack of mentality. I think that is what Mikel has changed.’

That mentality will be severely tested on Saturday against Wolves with the players needing to put behind them the disappointment of their Champions League exit against Bayern Munich.

European success also eluded Arsenal when Cazorla was there; twice they were knocked out by the Germans. ‘Bayern again, we always used to say after the draw. And if we didn’t get them it was Barcelona or Monaco in that year.'

If Arteta does become the first coach since Wenger to lead Arsenal to a title can Cazorla not take some of the credit? He confided in Santi when he was first offered the chance to work with Pep Guardiola.

‘No,’ Cazorla laughs. ‘Mikel had to make the decision. We spoke a little bit about it because he was just coming back from an injury and starting to feel good again. He said: “What shall I do Santi, keep playing which is what I enjoy or take this opportunity to work as Pep’s assistant? There is not going to be any better teacher for me.’

‘I told him that if the challenge excited him he should go with it. It’s worked out well for him.’

For Cazorla there is still a few drops left to squeeze out of his playing career. Will he then go into coaching?

Speaking about another old pal Xavi he recalls playing for him when he managed Al Sadd in Qatar: ‘As a player Xavi was very calm, never raising his voice, and now!’ says Cazorla back in sparkling storytelling mode.

‘My first game in Qatar we were losing at half time and I watched him throw a boot at the blackboard. He was shouting and cursing and I thought: someone’s replaced Xavi with someone else!

‘I can’t see myself in that way. But then again I wouldn’t have see him like that!’

‘He always had character, he was a leader, and he spoke well with calm. As a coach, the blood boils more and brings out the character in a different way.’

He feels for his old pal who will leave at the end of the season. ‘He arrived in an extremely complicated time, with one of the worst economic situations in Barcelona’s history,’ Cazorla says. ‘He won the league but it seems that it is never enough.’

All this puts Cazorla in mind of his own homecoming, although he seems to be enjoying it far more. Does he hobble around the supermarket on days off because of the physical toll?

‘No, because I don’t want people seeing me limp,’ he laughs. ‘The thrill of playing back home again takes away any aches and pains!

‘Whatever time I have left playing I just want to enjoy it. It goes so fast, it feels like it was only yesterday that I was here as a youngster starting out, and now I am 39 and at the end of my career but each stage has something wonderful about it.’

It would be a great year to bow out if he gets his boyhood club promoted just as one of his best friends in football lifts the Premier League title.