Henry back with a bang

What are you made of, Arsenal? It was the question Haunted of Highbury was asking at half-time on Good Friday as Liverpool were on course to continue the path of destruction begun by Manchester United and Chelsea. What was at stake did not need spelling out. Here was the crossroads: one way pointed towards cataclysm, the other catharsis.

When Michael Owen slipped Liverpool into a 2-1 lead, watching Arsenal was like looking at a boxer being pummelled on the ropes and wondering how much more punishment he could take, whether there was any defiance left somewhere in the pit of the stomach to summon a recovery. With morale on the floor, to recover from going behind twice demanded what one Arsenal coach described as (pardon the expression, but nothing else suffices) ‘big balls”.

Losing two ferociously contested and finely balanced cup games is one thing, but to throw away nine months of excellent work in the league would be madness. Arsenal knew it and responded superbly. And, let’s face it, it would have been understandable had they wanted to sneak out of Avenell Road and run away from the volcanic pressure of this very public implosion.

Thierry Henry said that the cup exits ‘felt like the end of the world”. He may not always be the man for the big occasion — critics cite a series of key fixtures in which the alter ego of this magnificent forward plays as if he has a big, dark cartoon cloud hovering an inch above his head — but on this most crucial of Premiership days he delivered so comprehensively that he went home with the match ball and Gérard Houllier’s nomination for goal of the month.

‘When you are a winner, you are never in doubt,” Henry said. ‘If we had doubts, we wouldn’t have come back from 2-1 down at half-time. We came out with such hunger and I have never seen the team feel such vibrations. We responded with our heart. It was extraordinaire.”

Henry’s undulating emotions during the match were a mirror image of the club’s feelings. Frustration as he jabbed a finger at a teammate’s off-beat pass, sadness as he bowed his head and dragged his feet.

Then he was transported into the marvellous musketeer, leaving three bamboozled opponents on the floor on his merry dance towards a sublime goal. Bottlers? Chokers? This was the answer to a justifiable accusation. The fans were indulging in olés, the team were hugging and Highbury glowed in the spring sunshine.

The club psychologist has to be out of a job after therapy like that.

Arsenal’s critical win over Liverpool does not, however, mask issues in the bigger picture. Come the closed season, Wenger must think hard about the size of his squad, the quality of his goalkeeper, the lack of a tactical plan B and, crucially, the team’s overdependence on Henry being in a good mood.

Is it coincidence that the striker’s least effective performances this season have occurred when the team have suffered their most damaging setbacks? Maybe it was down to this vague back problem, but the expectation he shoulders in the highest-profile games can derail his natural composure to a worrying degree.

It is easy to link Arsenal’s flamboyance — and foibles — to Henry, but the influence of Patrick Vieira is equally huge. The captain’s first-half display against Liverpool was colossal enough to keep a shaken team going. He was everywhere, he tackled everything.

‘He has really grown as a leader in the past six months and if we are where we are today, it is down to him,” enthused Arsène Wenger.

But Highbury’s professor did acknowledge that there was more growing to do in that department. For all the Zen love-ins symbolising Arsenal’s spirit, sometimes they miss the kind of gee-up that only a Tony Adams-style rollicking can provoke.

‘You use the big disappointments to go up to the next level,” Wenger said. ‘We have come much closer this year in the Champions League, but either we accept this is our level or we grow from there and come back stronger.”

Houllier is one man who expects them to push the boundaries. He puts Arsenal’s European limitations thus far down to bad luck as much as anything else, predicting: ‘It will come. It just needs patience. I saw the other quarterfinals and they are better than some of those teams. The way they played against us in the second half shows they are one of the best teams in the world. They were stunning.”

Wenger will sacrifice the FA Cup in future to save impetus for Europe, which spells the end of treble-hunting, except in the most gentle of ways. He pointed out that Europe’s fallen giants from Real Madrid and AC Milan, as well as Arsenal, took their domestic cups seriously.

‘I feel the FA Cup in the past three seasons took a lot out of us and I tell myself every year I won’t do the same — but then you play Manchester United in a semifinal and can’t play the reserves.”

So, is a treble too much to ask for?

‘With the quality of the league now here, it looks very, very difficult. But we were close,” Wenger said.

In time, he will analyse the maybes and reflect upon a golden opportunity missed. Maybe if Arsenal had seized the moment when Chelsea were down to 10 men in the closing stages of the first leg of their quarterfinal … Maybe if he had not offered the initiative to Manchester United in the league by bringing on Pascal Cygan at left wing … Maybe if he had picked someone more experienced/fit than Jeremie Aliadiare to lead the line in the semi-finals of the FA Cup…

But, for now, the best way for Arsenal to live with the maybes is to take a firm grip on the title. It is difficult to envisage a three-game swing with only six games to go, even though Sunday’s trip to Newcastle ended in a 0-0 draw.

Having spent a shade more than £1-million last summer, Wenger would have snapped off the hand that offered a healthy Premiership lead at Easter, plus quarter- or semifinals in the three cup competitions.

Last week’s press invective leaves him more saddened than surprised: ‘In modern life, nobody accepts any more that you can lose a football match, but it can happen any day.”

Only the Premiership left to go for? As Houllier ruefully pointed out, he would not mind a crisis like Arsenal’s and a player such as Henry to dig him out. —