By Rob Hughes
NOV 22 — There is no cure for what Thierry Henry is feeling right now.
Since his youth, he has been loved for what he does and he craved for that affection more obviously than almost any modern Frenchman.
Today, and to the end of his playing days, Henry will be stigmatised by his one foul act — his deliberate handball to send a nation, Ireland, out of the World Cup.
Saying sorry doesn't cut it. Claiming it was instinctive doesn't excuse it. Telling the media the morning after that a replay would be the fairest solution is hollow when he knows that was never going to happen.
Thanks to one (or two) touches of the hand, Henry will, fitness permitting, represent France at his fourth World Cup.
He may despise the word, but he cheated some Irish players out of their only chance of ever reaching one.
Will he care? You bet he will.
Will he live to regret it? He already does.
Am I suggesting this seasoned old pro, the most capped and highest scorer in French history, is so thin-skinned, so inherently decent, that one rotten moment will harm a whole career? Definitely.
Put aside the polemics. Forget the politicians jumping on the bandwagon of pretending they are for fair play even if he is not.
Don't even go down the road of the anonymous moron who defiled Henry's Wikipedia entry with an obscenity.
And don't be kidded by his friends Arsene Wenger and Roger Federer defending him.
This is about one man, one (or two) illicit touches, and the asterisk that will now be put against his reputation.
Not to excuse him, but to declare a fact, I have regarded TH as one of the few players we might rely upon, performance after hundreds of performances, to do something extraordinary.
Gianfranco Zola, almost invariably, and Lionel Messi, seven games out of 10, are in the same bracket.
To try to understand a performer, you need to know where he comes from.
Henry was a child of the mean streets of Les Ulis, a suburb of Paris. If your skin is non-white, or you are thin-skinned, it is not a pleasant place to grow up.
Henry is both of those. He got his fast genes from his father, Antoine, and his sensitive side from his mother, Maryse, a nurse. They emigrated from Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Antilles, and were poor.
The father, perhaps, wished upon a shooting star in the family. The mother simply wanted children to respect others, to achieve their potential, and to suffer the prejudices with magnanimity.
At 10, Thierry was king of his street with a ball at his feet. The others couldn't catch him, couldn't guess where his imagination was taking him. Some of those he left behind are now doing crime.
But professional scouts plucked him out of that even before he was summoned to Clairefontaine, the academy of the French Football Federation. At 12, he knew what bribes men would pay to lure him to their club.
That early illegality, suggesting that talent has a price beyond propriety, was engrained very early in the mentality of Diego Maradona in a Buenos Aires shanty and in Zinedine Zidane on the streets of an Algerian immigrant region of Marseille.
The Hand of God, the Head Butt, and now the Hand of Henry are flaws on characters whose game was brushed by genius.
But the sensitivity in Henry might have held him back had his path not crossed, in his teens, with Arsene Wenger.
Wenger was then the Monaco coach, and not yet the renowned manager that he became in Nagoya, Japan, and later, of course, Arsenal. How much of Henry there is in Wenger's approach to The Beautiful Game, how much Henry could ever have blossomed without the vision the manager coaxed into him, we may never be able to separate.
The Svengali coach, the initially shy, almost fearful player found their peaks in one another. The trophies won at Arsenal, but far more importantly, the style laced into them, push credibility to the limits.
Yes, I know that Henry could be exasperating at times. There were matches, sometimes a month of them, when you would go to Highbury (not the new Emirates Stadium), and sense within the first few minutes that TH was not in the mood that day.
But they were outnumbered maybe 10 to one by Henry changing a game with a flash of intuitive elan. With a cheetah's smooth acceleration, yet at the same time an almost hypnotic command of the ball, he would be free. And with oh so nonchalant audacity, he would score as he pleased.
He wasn't, in my view, ever a real captain, though Wenger, to try to keep him motivated, made him so.
Long before he left for Barcelona — for double the £10 million (RM58 million) Arsenal paid for him — we knew the best was over. Like his marriage to a model, it had a finite time, and just as a young daughter on whom he dotes could not save the marriage, nor could a new challenge with the world's best club side hide the fact that he is in recession.
Take away that breathtaking edge of pace, separate the vanity of Henry from the indulgent Wenger, and you no longer have the phenomenon he always wanted to be.
I'm not trying to paint Henry as a weak character. You do not come out of the poverty street to survive 15 years in the fame game if you lack courage. Nor, possibly, do you sustain that journey without a trace of arrogance and a great constitution to withstand the physical battery that is out there.
The ultimate irony of that cheat's handball is that it almost certainly was, as Henry tries to excuse it, an act of instinct. The instinct of a man whose career is ebbing, whose mind thinks principally only of himself, and of that one last World Cup to defy those of us who doubt there is one more month of glory in him.
I haven't mentioned Henry's dignified stance against racial prejudice. I deliberately haven't given voice to all those — including Thierry Henry — who have talked endlessly since Wednesday of that one unpardonable moment as if it defines a career.
That's because it won't do that. It will diminish his image, maybe even cost him a few millions in endorsements, but the final sadness is not what his errant hand did to Henry, but what it did to opponents who did not deserve to be beaten this way.
“I am not a cheat, and never have been,” is a lame lament for TH now.
And when he insists that it was instinct, that it all came to him so very fast, he actually defines his own decline. Instinctive brilliance, making the pace of the game seem irrelevant to him, is what used to make us gasp at TH.
Used to, past tense. — Straits Times
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