It has been said that the top flight of English football does not grow superstars and merely imports them (see Aguero, Shevchenko etc). With due respect to Feyenoord, the Premier League has cultivated a bona fide luminary in Robin Van Persie whose development has followed a strikingly similar pattern to that of Thierry Henry who joined Arsenal as a goal scoring left-winger and now is the proud recipient of a statue in his honour outside the Emirates Stadium. Van Persie has a long way to travel before even being considered for such an accolade but his performances over the last calendar year have been an absolute pleasure to witness.
My initial impression of RVP was similar to that of Cristiano Ronaldo who had joined the Premier League a season before, a player with huge potential but ultimately was more concerned about individual performance and his own image on the pitch which hindered his overall contribution, as evidenced by his poor assist statistics in his first two years at Arsenal. A further constraint on Van Persie’s progress, apart from the burden of labels such as the next Bergkamp, Van Basten and even Cruyff, was his abysmal injury record. In comparison with his contemporary Wayne Rooney, who joined Manchester United in the same transfer window that RVP teamed up with Arsene Wenger, Van Persie comes up nearly one hundred appearances short in all competitions, a clear mark of an injury-hit period in his career. In essence, after his first few years at Arsenal, it looked highly doubtful that Van Persie would live up to the high expectations of his manager and fill the boots of the inimitable Thierry Henry.
However, the exit of Henry may have been just the thing Van Persie required in order to step up to the plate at Arsenal. As a consequence of Henry’s departure the focal point of Wenger’s team became the relationship between two of the most intelligent and creative footballers in the league if not the world in Cesc Fabregas and Robin Van Persie. Van Persie often played as the lone-striker in the managers favourite 4-2-3-1 formation and the relationship between Fabregas, RVP and Samir Nasri really started to bear fruit. Granted, not in terms of silverware, but their contribution was the main reason Arsenal maintained their traditional designation as the nicest team to watch in the Premier League. Van Persie’s best goal scoring season to date, 2010/11, was largely thanks to the assists of both Fabregas and Nasri as well as their involvement in sharing the responsibility of hitting the back of the net. With these two central cogs in the Arsenal system being removed before the start of the current campaign one could be forgiven for thinking that RVP’s influence would wane but the opposite has occurred and 2011/12 has so-far been a huge success for Van Persie so much so that tabloid sensationalism has lead to him being linked with Manchester City, Real Madrid and Barcelona. In my own opinion, the reason for this is that good creative young players and experienced ones have come into the Arsenal first team to replace Nasri and Fabregas, these being Wilshere, Ramsey and Arteta. An additional thought is that, never being blessed with great pace, RVP has benefitted from having two jet-propelled wingers outside him, in Walcott and Gervinho, to rip open and stretch defences resulting in more space for him to work his magic and as we have observed this season he is deadly when afforded time and space.
As mentioned above, there has been much speculation about RVP’s future at Arsenal, all I would say on the topic is that Arsenal would surely be a shadow of the club without his mercurial talent and I would much prefer to focus on a player who is defying the critiques of an injury-prone player and a club in decline and doing it in spectacular style. His volleyed goal against Everton this season encapsulated Robin Van Persie’s tremendous season so far and, for me, cemented his status as the current reigning king of Premier League strikers.
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