Surreal Football

Theo Walcott: The tedious arsehole

Santi Cazorla, the post-modern footballer, is all about awareness. Cazorla can stitch together patches of movement in his head and create the kind of intricate picture which only real genius is capable of. Question is: did he top up his spatial awareness by nicking all of Theo Walcott’s?

It’s just a theory that would explain Walcott, who, despite relatively promising performance against Tottenham’s bedraggled ten men this week which has seen him praised yet again, seems to have fewer ideas about what’s going on around him than a goldfish. A goldfish which has been flushed down the toilet. Repeatedly, because he just won’t die. Go away, Theo!

Obviously putting Walcott up against a talent like Cazorla is a little unfair. Who does look intelligent against him? Much more than that, though, it’s unnecessary: Arsenal’s best ever runner into brick walls doesn’t need to be shown up by anyone actually good to look actually bad: he’s not relatively poor at football; he’s a pure conception of what it means to be poor at football.

The problem is: he’s not benign with it. Wide players who don’t possess a clue as to what they’re meant to be doing – on a football pitch or in life – can be found at a football ground near you anytime you want, but they aren’t the proud owners of a places in England squad after England squad: Theo Walcott is. They aren’t constantly defended either: Theo Walcott is. That makes him a symbol of injustice (albeit not really a strong one): a man who has been given every chance to perform and despite a failure to do so is still rewarded.

What’s he good at? Robin Van Persie said that he could score twenty goals last season, but he didn’t; his delivery into the penalty area is a weekly humiliation for himself and anyone nearby embarrassed by association; and his natural ability to be really, really quick, is as useful as a Ferrari with no wheels when it’s matched up with a lack of strength or balance and a sense of direction which works only in 2D. Managers see Walcott as an untapped resource because of his incredible pace, but they’ve got it the wrong way around: we’ve seen it all from Walcott: he’s quick, that’s it.

Which would be fine if not for the sense of injustice he carries around with him. Walcott’s interviews, conducted entirely in the language of cliché, speak not only of one of the dullest characters in a show consisting entirely of dull characters, but of a man who, when he speaks about proving critics wrong, might even feel that he has been hard done by in his career so far. 

The young millionaire picked for England regularly on blind faith alone believes that he’s hard done by: get on board with that, public.

In his early days as an Arsenal player Walcott was compared to Thierry Henry because he was quick, a wide player who hoped to become a striker and, the old classic, not white. One blogger began a piece by suggesting that Walcott had “never quite shaken off” these comparisons with Henry. Wrong: shaking off comparisons with Henry may well be the only area in which Walcott couldn’t improve – hands up who at this moment believes he’ll become Arsenal’s all-time top scorer? Yet it seems the man himself believes the blogger’s version of events, hinting that he’s simply not a wide player, as if he’s been mistreated, and as soon as he’s given the chance through the middle he’ll shine, just like Henry.

That might just be the clincher for Walcott as a footballing baddie: his sense that he has been poorly treated, which appears up against a career including going to a World Cup at 16, moving to Arsenal and being given chances for club and country worth so much more than his form deserves. Oh, he wants more money than Arsenal can afford, too. Grateful? Non. He’s a no-trick pony with a ludicrously ill-thought-out chip on his shoulder. For that, he deserves resentment as much as the classic, young, thuggish players who the world loves to hate. What does Walcott stand for? Being rich and ungrateful.

How frustrating, then, that every time he does do something of worth, as against Spurs, it’s seized upon by sections of Arsenal fans and, more sickeningly, neutrals as a great strike for the underdog, battling against the critics. Walcott has never had anything but the odds stacked in his favour: he has a misguided manager who has far too much faith in him and plays in a team which, though not what it once was (thanks partly to him) provides far more chances to thrive than he deserves. Just think of how often he gets the ball and wastes it: happening not to waste it on occasion doesn’t make him worthy of applause.

Walcott doesn’t need fans’ pity, or their desperate searches to find ways to praise him, he needs their vitriol. At 23, it’s getting close to the point where he isn’t allowed to be the cocky-but-useless-on-the-day young talent. He’s had seven years of resting on a World Cup callup which seems like it was probably a bet that Sven Goran Eriksson lost, someone should probably tell him that he has to do something else now.

Of course responding to criticism, as Walcott did against Spurs, is impressive in one sense, but it doesn’t prove the criticism unjustified, just as one good game in ten doesn’t make a good player. Consistency does. And even his biggest fan (himself) can’t say he’s achieved that. Declaring Theo Walcott’s career resurrected every time he plays well should probably stop quite soon, then. 

He’s the new Michael Owen: a non-player as soon as his pace goes. The only difference is that he’s never had the glory years.