Football Musings

Theo Walcott’s exclusion from Roy Hodgson’s 26-man provisional EURO 2016 squad was announced on Monday, and despite the fact everyone saw this coming, it was still greeted slightly with surprise. This was mainly due in part to the knee injury suffered by Danny Welbeck against Manchester City significantly increasing Walcott’s marginal hopes of being on the plane to France. Instead, the England manager decided to look elsewhere; leaving Walcott in a position of serious soul-searching on where and how a once promising career has stagnated.

Ten years ago, Walcott was surprisingly named in Sven-Goran Eriksson’s World Cup squad to Germany, despite having not made his senior Arsenal debut. The then 17-year old failed to get on the pitch as England crashed out in the quarterfinals against Portugal, but Eriksson, upon his departure after the tournament, defended his decision, pointing out Walcott was England’s Next Big Thing. “You’ll see that benefit in the next World Cup [2010] and then people will be sending me flowers,” said Eriksson. Fabio Capello, infamously, left Walcott of the 2010 World Cup squad and a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament ruled him out of the 2014 edition. Walcott has no starts for England at tournament level and his portfolio consists of just 112 minutes played across 4 matches at EURO 2012. It’s safe to say Eriksson won’t be receiving any flowers. At 27, Walcott should be in the prime of a career that promised so much but has disappointingly showed very little, and it is pertinent to ask where it has all seemingly gone wrong for the Arsenal player.

The obvious place to start is Walcott’s woeful injury record that has unsurprisingly hampered his progress. In ten seasons as an Arsenal player, Walcott has stayed fit for the entirety of just one season – the 2012/13 season when he scored 21 goals in all competitions including brilliant hat-tricks against Newcastle in the league and in that 7-5 thriller against Reading in the League Cup. It’s no coincidence he was most productive in his only injury-free campaign. The 27-year old’s career has been marred by consistent shoulder, back, knee, hamstring and assorted others. The most debilitating, though, was the ruptured cruciate ligament suffered against Tottenham in 2014; he was ruled out for nine months and was subsequently troubled by thigh and muscle injuries upon his return to action. For Walcott, 2014 never happened and two years later, Arsene Wenger still reckons it has played a significant part in derailing his progress.
“The only way to help him is to reassure, give confidence,” Wenger said. “I believe he’s still aware of his injury.” The litany of injuries has inevitably had a huge impact on Walcott’s consistency: one minute he’s finishing off a move with the dead-eyed precision of a high calibre marksman, the next he’s shunting it wide with all the accuracy of a man finding a light switch in an unlit room.

The running theme of Walcott’s career has been an inability to find what his best position is. For young players just breaking through, it is a welcome development to see them display versatility but for a 27-year old, it is bothering on unacceptable. Walcott came through the ranks as a winger blessed with terrific pace, but his insistence on playing as a centre forward has been a source of constant dilemma for Wenger. Walcott simply doesn’t score enough goals to justify his inclusion as a striker and provides no defensive cover for his full-back when played down the flank, meaning he is often a passenger the team can ill-afford to carry for large passages of play when he drifts out of games as he so often does when the goals dry up. Olivier Giroud, for all his faults, remains Arsenal’s first-choice striker, and with 24 goals scored in all competitions it is hard to argue with that. That Arsenal need a genuine A-lister is not in doubt, but right now the hunky Frenchman is the best Wenger has at his disposal. Despite Walcott’s obvious disadvantage, he has still been afforded opportunities through the middle this term to stake his claim for a regular spot in team; those opportunities have gone begging. The game at Old Trafford in February will be remembered for Marcus Rashford’s emergence into national consciousness but it is also a game Walcott will be in a hurry to forget. Arsenal’s longest serving player had a sum total of 17 touches and completed just 6 of 9 attempted passes in the 63 minutes he spent on the pitch, a tremendously disappointing return by any metric. Walcott has not started a league game since his non-performance in Manchester, and the emergence of Alex Iwobi has seen him slip further down the pecking order.

At 27, Walcott is Arsenal’s longest-serving player and as normal rules dictate is now eligible for his own testimonial. It is rather fitting that he holds this honour; no one player embodies Arsenal more than Walcott. A career that promised so much at the beginning has almost petered into nothingness, with moments of real brilliance few and far between, sandwiched between long spells of mind-numbing mediocrity. It wasn’t supposed to go this way for Walcott, and he finds himself at a crossroads at a crucial stage of his career. Wenger realizes how important the next few years are for Walcott, stating earlier this year that: “The next four or five years will be absolutely decisive for him because that is when you make your career.” “That’s when a good player becomes a great player, or just remains a good player.” Where Walcott spends the next four or five years is anyone’s guess.

There have been mutterings of discontent at his bit-part role at Arsenal, with a reported move from West Ham discussed as a possibility this summer. Perhaps Walcott could learn a thing from Andros Townsend, the man who beat him to an England call-up to the provisional squad. With his career drifting at Spurs, Townsend accepted a move to Newcastle where he has looked reborn despite the Magpies’ demotion to the second tier. It is an idea Hodgson certainly approves of. “Andros was unlucky to lose his place in the squad when he wasn’t getting a regular game and he’s gone to Newcastle, got a regular game, and done very well there,” Hodgson said during the announcement.
“Theo unfortunately has not got such a regular game over the last few months and has had a few problems with injury. It’s a tough decision of course but it’s one you have to take.”

The starry-eyed teenager that played no part in England’s 2006 World Cup campaign has full matured into a man without developing as everyone would have expected. Walcott has been accused of being too nice and not showing the sufficient level of desire to deliver on his potential. Whether these accusations have merit is another argument altogether, and the fact remains Walcott is at crucial crossroads in his career where he has tough decisions to make, lest he become yet another Golden Boy who never really took flight.

*This article appeared on Yahoo Sport UK under the headline: Premier League: Where has it all gone wrong for Theo Walcott?