Isn’t it crazy that Robin van Persie only scored his first goal of the season on the 8th of December? That goal came from the penalty spot against Partizan Belgrade at the Emirates.
At that point he was still easing his way back to full fitness, and did not find the back of the net again until January, when he scored a deflected free-kick against Birmingham. Since then, his and Arsenal’s form have been fantastic, and he now has 13 goals to his name, one behind top-scorer Samir Nasri, in only 20 appearances.
It’s form like this that makes you realise where we’ve so often struggled in the past few seasons: we were often forced to play without a striker last season, (in some big games, might I add) and our playmaker Cesc Fabregas finished the season as our top scorer with 19 goals.
In 2007/08 our season suffered after we lost Eduardo and Adebayor lost his form. Van Persie had been brilliant at the start of that season and missed almost all of the rest of it through injury. How useful would he have been in some inexplicable draws against Birmingham, Wigan, Aston Villa and Middlesbrough? And how useful would he have been on many of the other occasions down the years when we’ve created chance after chance but just lacked a little something special upfront to provide the finishing touch?
I’m convinced that, if not for his terrible record with injuries, van Persie would be thought of as one of the world’s best strikers right now, and Arsenal too would be held in higher regard, and have a few more trophies to show for it.
Without just looking at his impressive numbers, it’s easy to see in the sheer QUALITY of his goals that he is a player capable of creating a chance out of almost nothing, something Thierry Henry was very good at, but Adebayor, Eduardo, Bendtner and Chamakh not so good at.
In tight games, it’s those slightly cocky players like van Persie, along with the likes of Rooney, Ronaldo and Messi, that have the confidence to take some risks, and score the kind of goal out of the blue that Robin scored last night. No other Arsenal player could have scored that goal.
It breaks my heart to think that any day now we could hear news that he’s out for a few months again, and of course we’ll wait for him to come back because he’s so good, but that would stop us from signing a worthy replacement. Can we continue to rely on this world class forward who plays so rarely?
Let’s hope things go a little differently this season. In 2008/09 he happened to have a pretty injury-free year, scoring big goals in big games against Liverpool and Chelsea, and finishing as our top scorer. Sadly we had other issues in midfield and defence that season, but he showed the difference he can make. Without him and Arshavin’s January arrival we would not have finished fourth that year.
If the Dutchman can continue to play, then he can continue to score at this kind of rate. The rest of the team is as good as it has ever been while he’s been at the club, and he is obviously thriving alongside so many in-form attackers in Fabregas, Nasri and Walcott.
Even Barcelona couldn’t stop him. On his day, no one can, so let’s hope there are plenty more of those days to come.
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