One of the striking aspects of Arsenal’s slick passing football is that the team does not contain a playmaker or midfield maestro. There is, for instance, no Zinedine Zidane. Why slow the ball down in the centre of the park when you have Henry to unleash up front? No team has ever gone from box to box with the speed and precision of Arsenal. That’s why they are often at their most dangerous when defending a corner.
That all their operations in recent years have been conducted through Zidane might explain why the France side has yet to see the very best of Henry. There were rumours in Portugal of disagreements in the dressing room between the Arsenal players and those grouped around Zidane. That Henry has said he thought of retiring himself after the tournament may suggest it was not an entirely pleasing experience. ‘Well, as I said to everyone,’ he tells me when I ask about his disappointment in Portugal, ‘and everyone thought I was mad at the time, when we played against all the teams at the Euro, they were all sitting at the back waiting for us.
The Greeks did the same thing to us as they did to the Czechs and Portugal, winning 1-0. Fair enough to Greece, but I was just saying if you play against a team that don’t allow you to play football, I’m not complaining, I’m just saying sometimes it’s not easy.’Yet Arsenal have not had too much trouble breaking down sides that defend deep. Henry refuses this bait. Instead, he makes the bizarre suggestion that it is more important for teams to attempt to win in the Premiership than it is in international competitions. And therefore the opposition open up against Arsenal in a way they don’t against France.
Whatever the explanation, there was a suspicion that Henry was playing in Zidane’s shadow for France, while in England opponents were left looking at Henry’s shadow. In the event, it was Zidane, voted World Footballer of the Year in 2003, who retired in the summer from international football, not Henry, who came second in the same Fifa poll. The king is dead, long live the king.
Les Ulis, the suburb in Paris in which Henry grew up, is often described as a tough environment, full of the kind of social problems that can make or break a young man, what’s known in France as les quartiers difficiles. To be sure, it’s nothing like the postcard Paris of grand avenues and elegant cafes, but nor is it anywhere near as bleak as its English equivalents. A dormitory town just to the south of the capital, not far from Orly airport, it is made up of social housing built in the Sixties that, by comparison with the average English new town, looks almost resplendent. Most impressive of all is the sports arena, containing two excellent football pitches (one junior size) and a running track.
How many British towns with a population of under 30,000 have these kinds of facilities? It was here that the 11-year-old Thierry Henry played for his first team, Les Ulis. His coach was a vaguely Hercule Poirot-looking character named Claude Chezelle.
I meet Chezelle outside the breeze block apartments in which Henry used to live. He says that even at the age of eight, Henry stood out with his vitesse. Henry had an older brother, Willy, now a metro driver in Paris, who played football for a separate team for blacks and Arabs. Born into a more enlightened generation, Henry also had the benefit of a very determined father.
Antoine Henry, who came from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, told Chezelle that his son would play for France. ‘It is hard for kids to concentrate and Thierry was no different,’ Antoine admitted. ‘Perhaps I was a bit suffocating for him, but I felt I had to keep on top of him. I was so determined he should get the best chance I lost a job over it. I missed the start of a shift as a security guard after driving Thierry to a game and was fired when I turned up two hours late.’
Chezelle remembers how Antoine would ‘come to every game to watch his son. Thierry had the talent, but it was his father who had the ambition.’ Henry has echoed this point himself: ‘To say that my dad pushed me is an understatement. I was never naturally drawn to football.’ There were a number of young Africans in the junior leagues around Paris and, because some of them did not have birth certificates, clubs would sometimes put them in younger teams. ‘Thierry used to play against giants who would try to rough him up,’ his father recalled a few years ago. ‘It was just this kind of situation that proved to me one day that Thierry had the balls, as we say, to reach the top.’
On one occasion when Henry was injured playing for a nearby team called US Palaiseau, his father rushed on to the pitch to remonstrate with a referee. A fist-fight ensued and the match was abandoned. Such was the tension between Palaiseau and Antoine that Henry left to join another club, Viry-Chatillon. Unusually, the Palaiseau coach, Jean-Marie Panza, left to go with him. Henry has never forgotten that loyalty and not long ago named Panza as his mentor in L’Equipe magazine.
Chezelle shows me a photograph taken around 1986, when Henry was nine. He has a mini-afro and the familiar ironic-angelic expression that Chezelle says he inherited from his mother, Maryse, a native of Martinique. ‘He also had the same way of side-footing the ball into the net that he has now,’ says Chezelle. ‘When I watch him on TV it’s just like seeing the grown-up version of the boy.’
According to Antoine Henry, Thierry picked up his precision shooting from watching Marco van Basten, who was his hero. It was while playing for Viry-Chatillon that the 13-year-old Henry was spotted by a scout for Monaco called Arnold Catalano. He saw the teenager score all six goals in a 6-0 victory and did not bother with the normal procedure of setting up a trial. He pretty much signed him up on the spot.
‘Thierry has never been the prototype of the player who sticks in the box to score goals,’ said Catalano a while back. ‘He is so hard to block because he participates in the game before finding himself the space to score. The ball is alive when Arsenal are playing and you can see Thierry takes a lot of pleasure from the technique and movement of the players around him.’
The pace and composure in front of goal were always there but, as Catalano had it, ‘he wasn’t one for trying too hard if he couldn’t see the point’. It was Wenger who was responsible for instilling what Catalano called ‘professional grit’.
Before making his debut with Monaco as a 17-year-old, Henry completed a course at Clairefontaine, France’s renowned national football school. Claude Desseau, the director of the Institute National de Football, recalled that Henry had problems getting on the course because of poor school results. ‘We really had to convince the college principal to take him because he was such a super player.
He finally agreed to make a rare exception for Thierry. And, happily, Thierry got more serious about that side of things and went on to do very well with his education.’
Also at Clairefontaine, a year below Henry, was Anelka, Henry’s predecessor at Highbury. Though Desseau thought Henry an exceptional prospect, he considered Anelka to have the edge on talent - as indeed, apparently, did Anelka himself. Anelka and Henry have remained friends, but you could hardly say that they were now rivals. Henry is set on doing something that only the most dedicated athletes are capable of. In contrast to Anelka, he is fulfilling his potential.
‘I’m obsessed by the idea of making my mark on history,’ he said last year. ‘And Arsenal is my paradise.’ His sense of history may have been shaped by watching it made at frustratingly close quarters. Though he was France’s top scorer in the 1998 World Cup, he did not play in the final itself. He was due to come on five minutes after half-time, but Marcel Desailly was sent off, so he got no closer than the bench.
His fidelity to his club - he remains unmoved by the approaches made by Real Madrid and Chelsea, who were said to have offered ££40million - may stem, in part, from the lessons he learnt as a restless youth. He said he was dazzled by the lifestyle he encountered on the Côôte d’Azur. ‘Big boats everywhere, big cars, beautiful women, the sun, the sea, the famous people. Life could seem easy in a place like this and, even as a kid, I thought, "This might not be the best place to learn football".’
While still under contract to Monaco in 1996 and still a teenager, Henry was persuaded by his agents to sign an agreement with Real Madrid. However, Fifa insisted that he stay with the French club and later fined him ££40,000. Two years later he moved to Juventus and, like his Arsenal team-mates Patrick Vieira and Dennis Bergkamp, found himself strangled by Italian defensive discipline. Legend has it that Wenger was on the same plane as Henry one evening in 1999, flying back to France after a game in Italy. ‘Thierry,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘you are wasting your time on the wing. You are a number nine.’
In turn, Henry asked his old boss to rescue his stalled career. He had been relegated to the France under-21 side and questions were being asked about his mental strength. It is unlikely that Wenger’s travel arrangements that night were purely coincidental.
It was in fact Wenger, whom Henry has referred to as his ‘spiritual father’, who originally put him on the wing at Monaco as a temporary measure because the Brazilian striker Sonny Anderson was leading the line. And it was Wenger who brought him back into the centre, if you can really say that Henry plays in the centre. Though he has developed a good deal of physical, as well as mental, strength at Arsenal and is more than capable of holding the ball up, he is by no means a target man. ‘He has intelligence and ambition,’ Wenger has said. ‘When you put those two things together, you have a player who wants to improve. He will get better because he wants to get better.’
You can see the intelligence in the awareness he shows of the space around him. Perhaps it was this talent that led him to forsake the mock-Tudor attractions of Hertfordshire, the traditional home of north London footballers, for the more cosmopolitan environs of Hampstead, where he lives with his wife, Claire, better known as the model Nicole Merry.
‘Yeah,’ he laughs, the one moment of amusement he allows himself. ‘I was close to [moving to Hertfordshire] but luckily a friend saved me from it. It happened that I was going to live not far from there and it didn’t go through with the house, lucky for me. Then a friend of mine said that the place to live was Hampstead. It would have been a nightmare driving into London all the time.’
I mention that his team-mates and countrymen Vieira and Robert Pires live nearby in the cafe-filled hill-village that is Hampstead. ‘Yeah, they do,’ he says dryly, ‘but I see them often during the day. That’s enough.’
Viera, of course, was on the point of leaving Highbury for Real Madrid at the start of this season. Surely that would have provoked a visit to his house to talk him out of the move? ‘Well to be honest,’ he says, returning to the script, ‘it was a decision between him and the club. We had to concentrate on the beginning of the season, which was tricky because you don’t know if you’re going to lose your skipper. But he made the right decision. I’m sure he doesn’t regret that now that he can see the way that we can play. Obviously, if he had left it would have been a massive disappointment but I think the team spirit helped him make the right choice.’
That Arsenal have retained their celebrated team spirit is a surprise when you consider that it is a multinational squad with seldom more than two Englishmen in the team. The club of Adams, Dixon, Keown and Parlour, the team imbued with the will to win, or more often not to lose, is no longer. ‘Obviously it did change when they left,’ says Henry of his former English team-mates. ‘They are proper characters and great winners, but in another way they showed us the way to build... I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the fans. Obviously we do not have a lot of English players any more, but, in the end, we’re all wearing the Arsenal shirt. I may be French, but I’m playing for Arsenal.’
We talk a bit about the season ahead. He concedes that United and Chelsea are the main rivals, but thinks Liverpool look good. Then, in a moment of neighbourly generosity that may surprise some of the more entrenched sections of north London, he says: ‘Why not Spurs?’
United and Chelsea were the only English teams to beat proper Arsenal sides last year in, respectively, the FA Cup semi-final and the Champions League quarter-final. The defeats still irk Henry and he is at pains to point out that Arsenal had to play Newcastle, United, Chelsea and Liverpool in the space of eight days. Of the United game, he says: ‘They beat us, fair enough, nothing to say about it, but I don’t know if you remember the game, we had all the chances. They had one and they took it.’
With Chelsea he is a little more forthcoming in his praise. ‘I think Chelsea played a magnificent game [in the 2-1 win at Highbury]. We had a couple of chances, then in the second half they played better than us.’
I ask Henry if he ever watches himself and he says: ‘No,’ but he pauses and decides to admit the exception. ‘The only game I watched was Inter Milan away, because it was special. I don’t know, it was just a strange feeling. We had to win there and at the time we were not even thinking about the goal difference. And we won 5-1.’
Henry scored two that night and contributed as close to a perfect performance as is possible outside of REM sleep. It must have been particularly gratifying to have done so in Italy, where he had been deemed a failure, in the impatient Italian style, in less than a season. They know differently now.
His brother Willy said a couple of months ago that Henry has remained grounded, despite his superstar status and extreme wealth, and still visits him at home near Les Ulis. ‘He sleeps in the same room with me at the house or on the settee without any bother. We talk about anything and everything, but never football.’
It’s a shame, then, that Henry seems so eager, when we meet, to put on a cool front, because he’s cooler than that. For there is nothing as impressive as a man who takes his craft seriously and masters it, except one who manages into the bargain not to take himself too seriously.
When Henry started at Arsenal he said that it was his duty to adapt to life in this country. He learnt English almost as quickly as he runs and he learnt how to take the knocks and get up again. He learnt to appreciate the passion of the supporters, and the importance of team spirit. But we learned something, too. We discovered what it was like to see the very best each week.
This year if Arsenal can win the Champions League, or at least make it to the final, and if Henry can maintain the sort of form that he’s shown in the past couple of years, it is a near certainty that he will become Fifa’s world footballer of the year. It would be no more than he deserves. Because right now this is Henry’s world. The rest of us only live in it.
· Andrew Anthony is a contributing editor of OSM and is the author of On Penalties
