23 January 2024 , 16:03
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Arsenal forward Gabriel Jesus has had his Counter-Strike 2 account banned, having spent around $38,000 (£30,000) on in-game items.
Jesus took to social media on Monday to share a screenshot of his account and ask the game's developer Valve to unban him. "Hi @counterstrike my account received a VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban unfairly, can you help me? Follow the account link and print of the ban," he tweeted.
The 26-year-old also linked his account, which showed that he had bought thousands of pounds worth of in-game items, including a customised M4A1-S Hot Rod gun worth $800 (£630).
Counter-Strike is a hugely popular game in Brazil and Jesus' international teammate Neymar is another avid player of the game. The Arsenal star also has a Twitch account and once streamed himself and Neymar playing the games to over 10,000 viewers.
Jesus' account was apparently hit with the ban on Saturday, when he was in action for Arsenal as they beat Crystal Palace 5-0. He assisted Leandro Trossard as the Belgian scored the Gunners' third goal, with Gabriel Martinelli adding a late brace after Gabriel Magalhaes and an own goal from Dean Henderson put Arsenal 2-0 up.
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Reflecting on the victory, manager Mikel Arteta was delighted with his side's success from set-pieces. He said: "It's very important. The reality is we worked set-pieces less in the last week than all other aspects of the game.
"This is the beauty of it, we worked on a lot of things that happened and we trained them a lot. I'm really pleased with the clean sheet, which is something we have been missing to win more games, the amount of goals scored, and sharing those goals as well which I think is going to make a really good impact on the team.
"Having the ability to score from many different ways - especially when you attack a low block team like this - to score in a certain way everything has to be nailed absolutely perfectly. When you generate things that are a bit more chaotic, sometimes it opens teams up and is more difficult to do that.
"Today I think we exploited that really well because Palace had to change their behaviour and that allowed us spaces to exploit." Arsenal now have a short break before they return to action against Nottingham Forest on Tuesday and Arteta is planning to make good use of the break.
"At the moment we are really short in numbers, so we really have to manage a few players, especially players that have played a lot of football," he explained. "We have good training blocks, one to train really hard and other ones to use for game preparation, so we’re going to have to try to maximise that space."