Take a few minutes to picture yourself in this hypothetical situation –
You are a 16-year old footballer in England.
But you’re not just any 16-year old footballer. You happen to play at a club who run a youth academy that is widely acknowledged to be one of the best (if not the best) in England. You’re one of the academy’s finest prospects for the future and this is evident in how you are the club’s youngest player to make a senior appearance at the tender age of 16.
You are then suddenly handed the opportunity to move to a top first-division club during the January transfer window. You are now the most expensive 16-year old footballer in England.
The pressure is on.
You try to not let it get to your head. You’re just 16 – surely you’ve got a long way to go before you start playing regularly for your club, let alone your country? Your manager is convinced that it’s best for you to just focus on improving your game, and you concur with his opinion.
But then, out of the blue, you’ve been picked for your country’s World Cup squad.
You’re stunned. You are yet to make a first-team appearance at your new club. You don’t even possess your own driving license! And here you are, selected for the World Cup at just 17. People begin to draw parallels between yourself and a certain Brazilian player called Pele, who was also selected to represent his country as a 17-year old in 1958.
To add to all of that stress, you’ve been picked to play for not just any country – but for England.
The nation seen by many as the nation that ought to be the best in the world at the sport that you created. The nation that, save for 1966, has faltered at the World Cup for reasons that (supposedly) have a lot to do with the faults of others – whether it be the incompetent referees or your fraudulent opponents.
This also happens to be the nation that is home to plenty of tabloids journalists whose sole aim is to sensationalize stories to sell papers. Journalists who have, for many years, succeeded at building the expectations of their rather naive English readers to the point where any result save for winning the World Cup is seen as a complete failure.
The pressure is really on.
You do your best to not let it show though. People tell you to be tough, and you try your best to make sure the experience doesn’t appear to unsettle you. You make an appearance off the bench for the England ‘B’ team against Belarus a few weeks before the World Cup begins and receive some praise for your performance, but you do not feature in any of the World Cup games England take part in.
England’s eventual exit a few weeks later is (predictably) marred by controversy – which works out perfectly for the tabloid journalists in England. Plenty of fans and pundits alike question Eriksson’s selection policy – “Why did he leave out Jermaine Defoe and Darren Bent, but select this unknown, inexperienced 17-year old? We could’ve done with some firepower up front, Defoe and Bent are miles ahead when compared to this kid!”
The criticism appears to be omnipresent. The pressure is well and truly on.
Despite all the vilification and bad press – irrespective of whether it is directly or indirectly aimed at you, you do your best to not let it affect your game. You listen to what your manager has to say and do your best to ignore the rest.
You gradually begin to make a number of appearances off the bench and score your first goal for your club. But nonetheless, you know you could do better if it weren’t for the persistent shoulder injury you’ve been carrying for a while.
Your manager decides to play you out on the wing – which is a new experience for you. Your crossing isn’t up to the mark, and you know you have to improve – the critics do a good job of pointing this out.
Your manager backs you in public, and states that you’re only performing up to 50% of your abilities.
But the skeptics aren’t having any of it. You are for a certain period of time the club’s only British player, which has inevitably increased the pressure on you to perform. It’s been 18 months since your big money move, and the critics strongly believe that little progress has been made.
The pressure hasn’t let up.
You do your best to ignore what’s being said about you, and you work harder than ever on improving your game to prove your critics wrong. Your goal-scoring record picks up in your next few seasons at the club, and your ability to get the ball into the box improves as well.
But persistent injury issues remain a problem and prevent you from getting to your best. From a dislocated shoulder that took you close to 5 months to recover from, to other surgeries and problems with your back, knees and calves. There is absolutely no let-up. You see yourself branded as “injury-prone”, or “made of glass”. The lack of consistent game play has made plenty of experts to brand you as an “impact-sub” at best.
It all culminates with an ex-England international delivering a scathing assessment of your abilities as a footballer, going as far as saying that you do not have a “football brain”. You sometimes wonder if people forget that you’re just 21…
Let’s just jump out of this narrative and think about that for a minute.
Theo Walcott was just 21 in 2010, nowhere near his peak, and he’d already played at Arsenal for 5 years at this point, making close to 100 appearances for the club.
Whatever most of us had, have, or will have done by that point in our lives, I’m willing to bet that none of us have gone through levels of pressure that come even remotely close to what Theo did in his first 5 years at the club.
On one occasion, Wenger said about Walcott –
“He gets criticism because he raises the level of expectation so much that when he has a disappointing game or doesn’t make the difference, people straight away go at him because they expect something special.”
But despite all of the criticism and heightened expectations, Walcott continued to work hard to become a better player. Plenty of players have succumbed to external pressure from the media or fans, or have not had the mentality to follow through on making their talent truly count – the list is endless. But Walcott truly persevered and the results are beginning to show.
In the 2010/11 season with Fàbregas and Nasri running Arsenal’s midfield, Theo racked up an impressive 13 goals and 9 assists from the wing. In 2011/12, despite both Fàbregas and Nasri leaving, Walcott struck up an impressive partnership with RvP, who said in 2011 –
“After every single goal, people ask me, ‘Who gave the assist?’ I just say, ‘Who do you think?’ We have that connection. I know what he is going to do, which is very important. He knows where to find me. Stuff like that is vital.”
And in 2012/13, despite RvP’s departure and the new additions of Santi Cazorla, Olivier Giroud, and Lukas Podolski – all players who were in their first season playing in one of the toughest leagues in the world and had never played with each other (let alone with Theo), Walcott’s improvement continued as he enjoyed what was clearly his best season at the club so far.
He became the sixth player to reach 20 goals in a season under Arsène Wenger, scored Arsenal’s fastest PL goal against QPR in just 20 seconds, had the highest shooting accuracy in the PL amongst forwards who took a minimum of 50 shots, and contributed to a whopping 37 goals this season by scoring 21 and assisting 16.
What’s the best part about Walcott, you ask? The answer is simple – the fact that it doesn’t stop here. Theo is still 24 and is still yet to reach his peak as a player – there are few players that are/were as effective as he is as a 24 year old in terms of goals and assists.
Above all, what makes Theo stand out is clearly is attitude. His demeanor and the way he carries himself on and off the pitch smacks of a great upbringing and of class that exemplifies many principles that Arsène Wenger and Arsenal as a club cherish and value highly. For instance, Scott Golbourne, an ex-teammate once said about Walcott –
“Apart from his pace, I always felt one of his strengths was his great attitude. He always wanted to learn and improve and was always enthusiastic. Even when he wasn’t having the best game, he was always such a threat that teams would double up on him.”
The 2013/14 Premier League season is going to be an interesting and pivotal year for Arsenal Football Club.
Will the Mertesacker and Koscielny partnership at the back continue to thrive? And if it does, what does this mean for Vermaelen? How are Santi Cazorla, Olivier Giroud and Lukas Podolski going to fare in their sophomore season in the Premier League? Will Arsène Wenger decide to leave after seeing through his contract?
However, the most interesting of them all could be – will Theo improve on his incredibly impressive contribution to Arsenal’s 2012/13 campaign?
While it is hard to say if Theo does manage to do so seeing that we’re in August – it remains difficult to envision a situation where Walcott manages to stay fit for the entirety of the 2013/14 season, but does not improve on his numbers from last season.
What is certain, however, is this – Walcott’s contribution could be the most vital of the lot if Arsenal is to break their trophyless run this season. It’s time this unsung hero is given the praise he deserves.
