Tim Sansom
(Ed’s note – This piece was submitted in July, but as there was no great need to use it at the time due to more topical contributions at the time, we are running it now)
I know that according to some people, we should be totally jealous and envious about the lives of footballers. Many of us desperately hoped that we would be the next great thing for our club and our country, but our dreams did not quite turn into reality. We want to take our frustrations out on those who were able to make it in the game, and sarcastically believe that our football idols lead a ‘oh so’ stressful life behind the gates of their Hertfordshire mansions. We scoff at, what we believe to be, the daily worries of the average megastar player, which seems to stretch to the vexing decision whether they should expand their centrally heated pools for the coming summer.
We cannot stop people thinking what they think, and some of today’s players do conform to that stereotype, but we need to recognise that ‘all that glistens is not gold.’
The trouble with enjoying your football through the pages of Hello magazine is that you do not really appreciate the reality. It is not often that you see many Dagenham and Redbridge players in OK magazine. You might believe that everything is alright in their world of your megastar idol, because your player can afford gold crusted bed springs, but if you look behind the headlines, you wonder whether their career is quite where they hoped it would be.
The British football public are always in a desperate hunt for the next great footballing superstar. To a certain extent, I am in the hunt too. Who is going to be the next Wayne Rooney or Michael Owen? Who is going to score the next fabulous goal? Who is going to lift the Champions League trophy? Who is going to drag the England team kicking and screaming to World Cup glory after endless years of penalty shoot outs and embarrassing disappointment? That Rooney goal at Everton in October 2002 has a lot to answer for.
There is an ever growing group of ‘next Rooneys’ in the British game. Some of those players have fallen by the wayside, but some are still in the game, and Theo Walcott is part of that latter club. I have to express a particular interest, in the fact that I love the sight of attacking wingers, who confront the opposition with skills and pace, so I would cheer Walcott to the rafters, regardless whether he was injured or totally out of form. However, at the age of 22, and at the height of his physical prowess, Walcott should be confident in his playing ability, and enjoying his football. He should not be contemplating a revamp of his game.
It is difficult to believe that Walcott is only twenty two, because he seems to have been around the football world for ever. It is five long years since that World Cup in 2006, when Walcott went to Germany as the ‘next Wayne Rooney,’ but did not kick a ball once. After all the build up, it was a crushing disappointment for such a young player, but too many of us were more concerned about a Portuguese man’s wink and whether it was solely down to Ronaldo that England did not win the 2006 World Cup.
Then we headed through the next five years and we saw flashes of true brilliance from Walcott’s boots. The sad fact for Theo is that these flashes have been burn out with long periods of injury. I can only speculate whether these injuries are due to Walcott’s pacey style of play, where his body is put through intense stress during one of his blistering runs up the wing. When Walcott comes up against an uncompromising defender, who puts his leg out like a felled tree trunk with the sole hope of sending Walcott’s body into the sky, Walcott does not stand a chance. A spell on the side line beckons with treatment tables and magic sponges. I sometimes wonder whether Walcott is a continental winger playing in an English game that is so primeval in nature, despite what some people might say.
So Walcott has reached the age of 22, and there is a lot of baggage for him to carry. There have been some great games and great goals, but in our desire for greatness to be evident for the whole of the ninety minutes for every single game of the season, means that we are expecting a lot more. Maybe, that is why Theo Walcott wants to reinvent himself as a striker. He says that he has “done his trade out of the wing” and “hopefully the fans will start seeing me a bit more up front… it just depends on the players the boss brings in.” That is probably the $1000 dollar question facing most Arsenal fans.
22 years may be the perfect time for a player to undertake a reinvention on the pitch. It would be difficult to undertake such a move when you head pass your mid-twenties towards the 30 years old mark. I hope that Theo Walcott is able to have a season where he can make a real mark in the crazy ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ English game. However, I hope that Walcott’s pressing desire to be a striker does not mean that he loses the opportunity to take the ball to run at defenders, and split the defence to bare down on goal.
Living a dream life is totally irrelevant. I sense that this player, at the tender age of 22 is at an important point in his career. Instead of endlessly hoping that Walcott is the next Wayne Rooney (or even Henry,) with all the pressure that this hope entails, we should give the player some space to develop in his own way, with the hope that Walcott can have a continuously successful season during 2011-2012. Arsenal and England will benefit if we do. Theo Walcott should be in his footballing prime, and life will truly begin at 22 for this exciting player.
