TWO of my seven grandkids (Scarlett and Gracie) have been staying with me for the holidays and to stop them fighting I usually stick on that timeless classic – the Wizard Of Oz.
Not only does it shut them up but I love the moment when Judy Garland (alias Dorothy) meets the scarecrow on the Yellow Brick Road and he sings (all together now): “If I only had a brain”.
It reminds me of Theo Walcott.
Especially so this week when football has had to endure the serialisation of one of the great works of English literature (he jests) – Theo Walcott: The Biography.
“Theee-o, Theee-o,” chant the faithful religiously at The Emirates.
It is the blind leading the bland.
What about the goal he scored so instinctively against Udinese on Tuesday you say? What about the two sitters he missed I say? When he has to think. No. He flatters to deceive.
Theo Walcott is 22 and has achieved absolutely NOTHING in his career. And certainly nothing to write home about – let alone record in a book.
He continues to survive on the word “potential”. So I repeat. He is 22. I rather suspect that when he is 32 we will still be describing his “potential”.
Like the scarecrow, he doesn’t have a brain to fully utilise his God-given gift of having a sprinter’s pace which frightens the hell out of even the best of defenders.
Perhaps it would have been more appropriate had he chosen athletics as his sporting career – he would be a cert for gold with Team GB in the 100 metres in the 2012 London Olympics.
The greatest player I have ever seen in an Arsenal jersey is Dennis Bergkamp. “The game is played laterally,” he once explained in a rare interview.
“It is about vision, awareness – of instinctively knowing where your team-mates are all around you.”
Poor Theo plays The Beautiful Game in blinkers.
He is one-dimensional and runs in straight lines – usually into defenders. And his final ball is, well . . . awful. Listen to Olly a car valeteer here in Weymouth. He has Southampton in his DNA.
“I have seen three talents come through our ranks,” he says. “Walcott, Gareth Bale and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain who has just signed for Arsenal. Gareth was always going to be a star as will Alex who is more technically gifted than Walcott.
“Theo is just infuriating because you always like one of your own making it big time. But he has done nothing for Arsenal. I think the worse thing that ever happened was him scoring that hat-trick for England a few years back. People thought then that he was about to explode like a Wayne Rooney.
“But no. If Arsenal cannot bring it out in him then I doubt whether we will ever see the superstar we all once expected.”
Perhaps he needs a Dorothy to sort him out.
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