SPECTATOR SPORT
Top Gunners
Michael Henderson
AUDEN encouraged us to 'honour if we can the vertical man though we value none hut the horizontal one'. If 'Uncle Wiz' was referring to himself, he may have had a point. One of the two or three truly great poets of the last century, he was nevertheless denied the Nobel Prize, though his reputation has survived that deprivation and will continue to do so.
His words came to mind the other day when a slip of a lad called Coren, who writes on grub for the Times, declared, rather too boldly for his own good, that this country's writers had not produced any 'world-class' novels in the past 25 years. Evidently he has not read, inter aka, Trevor, Naipaul, Unsworth, Fitzgerald, Swift, MeEwan, Boyd, Ishiguro, Frayn, Spark, Amis, Golding and James, to name a few obvious authors. Either he is a forgetful young trougher, or an ignorant one.
In sport, no less than in other spheres of activity, there is a tendency to value the performers and the performances of the past more highly than those of current players, and in most cases we are right. There aren't any native footballers, for instance, to put alongside Moore, Best, Law and Dalglish, never mind Finney. Matthews, Lofthouse and Mannion.
It is a similar tale in other team sports. Jonny Wilkinson, the stand-off half, and Michael Vaughan, the opening batsman, stand out clearly from the crowd, and have it in them to achieve true greatness. In Wilkinson's case, with a rugby World Cup coming up, we shall have a better idea of his worth by the end of the year. As for Vaughan, he has suddenly acquired wings, and is closer to greatness than seemed possible even three months ago.
So there are vertical men we can honour, and another plays for Arsenal, or the Arsenal as they are commonly known. Thierry Henry, the French striker, scored his 100th goal for the club last weekend in the 4-0 win at Birmingham, which maintained the club's five-point lead at the top of the Premiership. Now he has Ian Wright's Gunners record of 185 goals in his sights, and one hopes he beats it, for he is a far superior player to Wright, and represents altogether better value for the game.
When Henry joined Arsenal four years ago. from Juventus, he was a winger of sorts and they were trying to overhaul Manchester United, who won a unique treble of Championship, FA Cup and European Cup in 1999. Now Henry is acclaimed as the finest centre-forward in the land — possibly Europe and Arsenal are a team transformed, Never in the club's long and successful history have they played football of such liberty; indeed, of such distinction.
Arsene Wenger, their French manager, has been accused of buying too many foreign players and of undervaluing English ones. But, with a record like his, he is entitled to say of Henry, as Miles Davis did, when somebody asked him why he had chosen John McLaughlin, a white Englishman, as his guitarist, 'Show me a nigger who can play like that!'
Arsenal will almost certainly retain their title, and they may take some stopping in the Champions' League, a bloated enterprise that starts to get interesting in the spring. They have a collection of outstanding players, and they have strength in depth, which all clubs need in the modern game.
But, whenever Wenger selects his best side. Henry will always be in it, alongside Robert Fires and Patrick Vieira, two of the other gifted Frenchmen at Highbury. However illustrious their club's history, Arsenal fans can honestly claim they have never had a better team than this.
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