Thierry Henry by Auclair Philippe

Author:Auclair, Philippe [Auclair, Philippe]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780230767386
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

9

His ball, his team, his garden.

THE HENRY PARADOX I

The numbers are prodigious. Between 15 August 2001 and 25 June 2004, Thierry Henry took part in 189 games for club and country, that is sixty-three per season, scoring 120 goals along the way, giving him a strike rate of 0.63 per match over that three-year period. The records started tumbling, beginning with Ian Wright’s total of thirteen goals in European competitions for Arsenal, beaten when Thierry scored a brace against Schalke 04 at Highbury on 19 September 2001. Milestones were passed at an accelerating rate, making it obvious that it was a question of when, not if – barring injury, and provided that another club didn’t lure Henry out of Highbury – the most prolific European goalscorer of that period would, at least in terms of raw statistics, set standards that no Arsenal player of the future could improve upon. His hundredth League goal for the Gunners was scored on 10 February 2004, in a 2-0 defeat of Southampton. A little over two months later, the first and only quadruple of his career, against Leeds United, enabled him to reach the 150 mark in all competitions. Personal honours and distinctions followed with an air of inevitability: the Premier League Golden Boot, twice, in 2002 and 2004; the PFA and FWA Player of the Year and Footballer of the Year awards in 2003 and 2004, which made him the first-ever player to be distinguished twice in succession by the Football Writers Association; the consolation of being named French Footballer of the Year in 2003, having narrowly missed on being voted that year’s Ballon d’Or. Innumerable Man of the Match awards, including that given in the 2003 FA Cup final, which Arsenal won at the expense of Southampton. Genuine trophies, too – the 2001–2 League/FA Cup Double, the 2003 Confederations Cup, of which he was both Golden Shoe and Golden Ball winner, and, to cap an astonishingly consistent three seasons of prowess, the 2004 Premier League as part of one of English football’s greatest-ever teams, Arsène Wenger’s ‘Invincibles’. Henry had not just laid an unquestionable claim to being considered a giant in Arsenal’s history, he could now be counted among those exceedingly rare players who come to embody an era of English football as a whole, as George Best or Éric Cantona had done before him.

Talent, consistency of performance and goalscoring exploits are not enough to achieve this status; we will take artistry as a prerequisite, and charisma as a given; yet even all those attributes taken together do not necessarily suffice to produce that peculiar aura which, in Thierry’s case, also had to do with the easy grace he showed on and off the field. I was not particularly taken with the ‘va-va-voom’ catchphrase which advertisers had picked for the Renault Clio campaign that Henry fronted from 2002 onwards,27 but I must concede that it certainly caught a mood and offered a new template for ‘Frenchness’ which was quite distinct from those provided by, say, Éric Cantona or David Ginola.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.