Wincing in a Walcott Blunderland

Ewen Cook frets at the final-third fumbling of our boy wonder...

“THEEEEE-O, THEEEE-O, THEEE...O? Thee... Oh.” Sound familiar? It should do: it's the 55,000 anguished Gooners sitting to your left.

It pains me to say it, but right now young Walcott is all mash and no sausage: a headlight-dazzled goonerbunny who, despite his evident ambition to be a jet-heeled, Owen-esque goal plunderer, simply goes to pieces within 30 yards of the sticks. There are, quite frankly, pepper-sprayed chinchillas with cooler heads.

But don't let the headline of this piece (nor the unnecessarily spiteful intro) fool you entirely. That was just to draw you in, to rouse your Theo-love like a protective father who'd rather spit blood than admit his fleet-footed seed keeps having a wet dream every time he gets near a box.

No, like you, I wholeheartedly agree that our squeaky-clean young gun is actually the dog's throbbing nuts — a fantastic talent who is merely an encrusted bedsheet or two away from the kind of full-blown pisstakery Wenger snaffled him up for. Surely there are few sights that have quickened the pulse with such sweet pleasure this season than Theo — our golden young gazelle — suddenly gunning the engine and tearing from midfield to the byline in a jinking blur.

However it is precisely here that the problems set in. After that initial roar from the stands, urging our hot young buck past opponent number two and onwards into money-shot territory, the excitement all gets a little too much… and it’s sticky-pants time once again. Move over, chance wasted, Kleenex needed.

One first-time cutback to Cesc in the 7-0 exhibition against Prague aside, Walcott's boyish brain and fledgling feet simply seem to disconnect when the crunch comes. A misplaced five-yard final pass to RVP; a ballooning cross to a screaming Ade; a half-chance which needs rasping goalward that gets knocked square: the wrong decision is made again and again — with such unerring consistency, in fact, that one suspects young Theo may be involved in a secret three-way love tryst with Francis Jeffers and Michael Duberry, sneaking back onto the training ground each morning at 11am contaminated and confused.

Football has a habit of serving up these paradoxes. Despite Walcott having been denied a serious run of games in his favoured striking position, it is clear to all and sundry that the lad is at his most useful when supersubbing it down the right wing circa 65 mins — giving the team an extra lick of pace and the crowd a valuable clip around the chops. And yet, at this exact juncture, the team's fortunes would almost be better served by the bizarre sight of Flamini arrowing towards the touchline and crunching into the tackle, dispossessing Walcott and simultaneously pitching his featherlight frame over the advertising hoardings and safely off the field of play.

Granted, it wouldn't exactly be Ajax '74, but as Theo's beleaguered little face pops back up from behind a three-foot high Nike logo, peering hazily as Eduardo sweeps the ball home, the thunderous delirium booming from the stands would surely make up for a smidgeon of tactical unorthodoxy — and perhaps even a damaged collarbone.

But I digress... And unfairly, too, for what we are sitting on is unarguably a goldmine — a goldmine at whose centre rests a pot of liquidised rainbows. My impatience, of course, is born of excitement — not dismay. And yet… the nagging questions bore into my brain: Exactly when is the temperament going to catch up with the talent? At what point will nous shore up the niftiness? Will the final flourish ever match the flair? Because right now, the supposed love-affair between Theo and the last third isn’t just failing to reach the bedroom, it’s lying in gooey puddles all over the landing.

Obviously, the boy needs time. And time he surely has. After all, it wasn't so long ago that the impish Theodore, looking for all the world like a miniature Thierry Henry plastic figure that comes free in a packet of cornflakes, arrived in his Arsenal-patterned pyjamas to coos and cuddles. Oh how we tittered and swooned as Theo pitter-pattered his way into our lives like a bleary-eyed Bambi: all sweet and innocent and in need of fatherly hugs.

Uncle Arsene, of course, fully aware of every inch of the situation, saw all that golden day. He saw the slender frame and tiny ankles. He noted the trembling legs and quavering lip. He clocked the matching Arsenal-patterned pillow and duvet set stashed in Theo’s mum’s glove compartment. He knows.

And what he knows is just how special this one could prove. Cartoonish good looks, unbridled youth, phenomenal speed, pure fizzing potential... and all in an Arsenal shirt: it's as if Le Prof personally grew him in the WengerLab, emerging boggle-eyed and triumphant with his divine creation after several mutated, gremlin-like failures (Pennant instantly springs to mind — he's Theo's evil twin if ever there was one).

Thus all we need do, dear friends, is get behind the wonderful whippersnapper and roar him on into surefooted stardom. No more than that. Though if you (and presumably Scotland Yard) will excuse me, I may from time to time hand-deliver a blood-written plea to our tactical godfather, urging him to step up the pace and give young Walcott the full Mary Poppins treatment before my hair is comprehensively and irreparably torn out.

“A spoonful of Wenger helps the muddling go down” — I can picture him dosing our Theo now. Dose him good, Arsene, dose him good. For all our sakes.


This article appeared in The Gooner, issue 181.
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