This morning’s Guardian suggests that Theo Walcott may be headed for Chelsea at the end of the season. The strangeness of this story is at least two-fold. Firstly, I doubt whether underfire Andre Villas-Boas is thinking about new signings at this point in time. He is probably too busy trying to save his bacon in the immediate future.
Secondly, if AVP45 does actually want the winger, it’s an odd choice for me because Theo Walcott has threatened for so long to become a top player without actually reaching the promised land. Remember the hat-trick for England? And the dismantling of Chelsea themselves at The Bridge earlier in the season? Wonderful games for Walcott but he has enjoyed far too few of them and continues to exasperate the Arsenal faithful in the same way that Nani regularly angers Manchester United fans, not to mention Wayne Rooney – noone can redden the face of Wazza like the profligate Portuguese.
Both can be lethal but while Nani is starting to produce the goods fairly regularly Walcott, for me, still squanders possession too often in the final third. Think how many more goals your teams would score if Nani and Walcott never gave the ball away? It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes.
Most of the time, watching Theo Walcott is like watching me play PES. Ask me to run up the wing in one direction really fast with the ball and I’m your man. But when it comes to the ‘incidentals’ such as turning, crossing and execution of precision passes, short or long, I’m nowhere. It seems that too many English wingers are infected with this malaise. Pace to burn but not enough vision or composure to make it really count. Aaron Lennon, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Walcott, Kieran Richardson and Jermaine Pennant – the list is long enough to suggest a trend – wingers who have all the natural attributes to succeed but play, too often, with their heads down and never seem to evolve from the status of ‘hot prospects’.
Many will of course counter that Theo is a top talent and some club is about to enjoy the fruits of his impending maturity. This could easily happen, but I’m not sure. Of course he will still give you the odd jaw-dropping moment of supreme skill, beating 5 men before battering an unstoppable shot between the sticks from 25 yards. But this almost makes it more frustrating because you can see what he’s capable of but he so seldom produces the goods. Instead, he often tends to give the ball away cheaply or run into a cul-de-sac of opposition bodies as if he hadn’t noticed that they were there. I’ll take Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain any day. Let’s hope he develops in the way that the others should be.
