Richard Williams sees Thierry Henry show just why Arsene Wenger is so desperate to hold on to him
For one man, last night's meeting of Arsenal and Real Madrid promised to provide a pivotal career moment. On the London club's fate, on the question of whether they would make a success or a failure of preserving their advantage from the first leg, Thierry Henry's continued presence might depend.
Arsene Wenger has left no one in any doubt about the importance he invests in the club's ability to persuade his fellow Frenchman to sign a new contract. The decision to give Henry the captain's armband in succession to Patrick Vieira was surely prompted by a desire to convince him that Highbury is where he belongs. Given Arsenal's receding chance of qualifying for next season's Champions League, last night's attempt to reach the last eight represented a chance to show Henry that he might not have to leave in order to add the continent's top club trophy to his array of medals.
His performance in the opening 45 minutes would have convinced any potential bidder of his value. Although Arsenal needed, above all, to prevent their visitors from matching their own away goal from the opening leg in the Bernabeu, they were nevertheless able to produce a sufficient number of effective attacking moves to suggest they are at least on the road to recovering the form that, a couple of years ago, made them the most feared and admired side in Britain. At the heart of virtually all was the willowy Henry.
There could hardly have been a greater contrast than between an Arsenal side packed with inexperienced youngsters and a team relying for its quality on players either well past their best, like Zinedine Zidane, Roberto Carlos and Ronaldo, or getting on that way, such as David Beckham, Guti, Michel Salgado and Thomas Gravesen.
Whereas Arsenal were putting faith in the experience of Henry, Freddy Ljungberg and Gilberto Silva to provide reassurance for the relatively untested Cesc Fabregas, Mathieu Flamini, Alexander Hleb, Jose Antonio Reyes, Emmanuel Eboue and Philippe Senderos, Madrid were looking for a flicker of genius from the dying embers of talents that once seemed inextinguishable.
The danger of the Castillian club's approach could be seen after 15 minutes when Ronaldo made his way into the Arsenal area with the ball at his feet and only Jens Lehmann in front of him. Once upon a time, that would have been all she wrote. There would have been puff of dust, a bulging net and a broad smile on those familiar features. This time, however, Gilberto Silva was able to catch his compatriot and nick the ball away.
And then there was Zidane, who, like Ronaldo, has had his problems with injuries but has never permitted an ounce of visible fat to impede his stately movement. Yet when Beckham, from wide on the right, found him with a majestic 40-yard pass angled to the left side of the penalty area to meet the Frenchman's stealthy run behind the last defender, nothing came of a marvellous opening.
Arsenal, by contrast, were genuinely unfortunate not to increase their advantage before half-time. Hleb, always enterprising if not invariably precise, was at the heart of a move that almost gave them an early lead, feeding Henry and looping round to take a return pass before sliding the ball across to Ljungberg, whose pass to Fabregas produced a shot that Roberto Carlos deflected for a corner. But the Brazilian left-back was too late to intervene three minutes before half-time when Henry capitalised on Sergio Ramos's poor control, and squared the ball to Reyes, whose drive smashed against Iker Casillas's crossbar.
That was the kind of combination play Wenger loves to see and which Real Madrid, a collection of individuals in search of a collective ethic, found it hard to match.
