When Prime Thierry Henry Was Simply Unplayable

Who's the best player in Premier League history? Thierry Henry. A magician. Thierry Henry. Thierry. I think that's got to be Henry. Thierry Henry. No need to explain. Henry! Breathtaking. Just breathtaking. When you mention the name Thierry Henry, you're not just talking about a footballer. You're talking about an artist who painted masterpieces on the pitch. A man who redefined what it meant to be a striker in the Premier League. Arsenal's all-time leading scorer. France's captain. A World Cup winner. A champion of Europe. But who was he really? What made him so special? Today, we let those who knew him best analyse his story. At the beginning, you want to be the best in your house. Then you want to be the best in your street. Then the best in your town. And then the best in your district. And the best in your, you know. I knew that from a young age already he was special. The big change that made Arsenal was reinventing Henry. And the goals. I mean, it was fantastic. When he was on his day, and even when he was not sometimes, he was unstoppable. I mean, big defenders and great defenders. They didn't really know what to do with him. Thierry Henry's the owning player I've ever seen in the Premier League. Who looks like he's a 20-year-old playing in an under-13s football league. He was scary. Head and shoulders above everybody else. Everybody. I mean, that Liverpool goal. I mean, he's going past international footballers there. I mean, top, top draw players, you know. And making them look pretty silly, if I'm being honest. And they'll look back and say the same. And I don't see anybody doing that anymore. Probably I would have to pick Thierry Henry. He's one of those players where you felt that, yeah, he was so superior to the rest that he could completely dominate the game. He was, for me, the most elegant player. A player that everybody wants to go to the stadium for. I think that Henry was a player I would love to see. Yeah, if you mention Thierry Henry, I mean, that's, yeah, for me, the best player I've ever played with. I still don't know what his weakness is. It's unbelievable how good he was. I think I heard you mention him that he could be Michael Jordan of football. Yes, he had everything. Unbelievable. It's funny because there was times he'd watch Arsenal and then we're getting in a game and people are holding us out and then Thierry would have, like, five, ten minutes of his best and the game is over. I would go with Thierry Henry from Arsenal because Thierry was one of the best, if not the best player in the Premier League. Because he can win games by himself. Thierry, you know, just for, sometimes you just need someone on those, you know, in that tight situation in a big game, to be able to turn something out of nothing and get a goal. You know, be in the right position. You need sometimes, you also need a good, great forward, but also sometimes you need a lucky forward as well. I thought Thierry had both. He was very skilful but also had a knack of being in the right position at the right time. Because he adapts quicker than he should his game to the loss a little bit of his potential. And I think he's too much convinced in his head that he's not capable anymore to play as he played before and adapts the game to what he thinks is his new personality. When I look at you and you know I'm going to shoot, I can tell you and you can't do anything about it. You can't save it. When I scored that goal against Leeds, you remember when I came back? Yeah. I'll share what the goalkeeper said to me at the end of the game. He said, I knew you were going to do it. I saw you doing it so many times, I still couldn't get it. That's priceless for me. Can I ask you one question? Go on. Your best position was on the left. Everywhere, man. No. Off the left. Do you reckon you'd take him on? Seriously. In my prime? In your prime. All day! Tell you what, why don't you have a race now? He's quicker than anybody. Then the thing is that you have to take some distance from him when you think that he's going to get the ball because if you get too close, then if you do the movement right to go left, then you're in trouble. Yuyang Rui was just quite incredible. An Olympic sprinter, not wearing spikes, but with football boots on. He was just, honestly, and in 2003, 2004, he just became like an animal on the pitch. So driven. Speed does make people scared. At the beginning of the game, I was always going to give it at five runs for no reason in behind to let you know, I'm faster than you so stay there so I can get my ball and maybe do that. But also there's something that's important. You need to have a lot of weapons because if it was only about speed, you wouldn't have been scared because there was a lot of guys that were fast in the league at the time. But if you add, like I mentioned, control, speed, accuracy, balance, left foot, right foot, it's almost difficult, almost virtually, I would say, impossible to defend. People talk about Ronaldo, the Brazilian. Yuyang Rui is more complete. Oh, mate, the best and the fastest thing you've ever seen. So powerful. One day in training, we had some fast lads, Justin Hoyt, Gael Clichy, Quincy Owusu of Bale. Rapid lads. And Thierry was obviously the fastest by a mile. And I'm sure that they had a race one day and by the halfway line, Thierry turned, run backwards and just breezed it off, mate. It was like you've never seen pace like it in your life. I just saw Thierry Henry walking past. You know, he's the kind of player I always wanted to look like. You know, scoring all the goals, winning all these trophies with Arsenal and Barcelona later, the World Cup with France and everything. He's an example for me. He's an inspiration. So to have my name next to his, I think it means a lot for me, you know. But I think Thierry was able to play a game on his own. I think you have like this fear factor. You play against Thierry Henry, I think defenders are really afraid. Well, like he was able to make you really tired. His energy, his volume of game, his capacity to be very complete and very busy on the day. Yeah, at some point you're going to make mistakes and he's going to score. Well, Thierry, if he decides, it's over. It's just over. When I was a young guy and I watched your style, your move without the ball, I want to be like you. I want to be like, I want to score the goals like you. And I know that you cannot compare the players. You cannot be the same players. But I want to take something for the best player in the world and try to do similar or the same way or the same technique or something like this. And you helped me a lot with this. And I have to say thank you for this. The open body strength to be able to protect the ball is unbelievable. Did you go in the gym and do a lot of weights? In my surprise, I never used to go to the gym. No? Wow, I thought you would. No, never. Not any leg weights or anything? Nothing. Zero. I valued more minutes on the pitch than minutes in the gym. That's only me. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but that's only me. Because if I miss my cross, eight, nine minutes, and Dennis Bergkamp is a long second post and he doesn't reach him and I was in the gym, not working on my left foot or my free kicks or whatever it was that I was working on, I valued that more. Yuri Henry, when I was there, my early years at Arsenal, he was at his very, very best. You know, you played against him and he was a beast. He was a beast and, you know, fantastic. I learned so much from him. He was just a threat. He was always a threat. You always have to be on your toes. And once he was behind you, there was no... I don't think anyone would probably get back to him. The one thing that made me retire was the fact that I had to face someone like Omri that could embarrass you. He could embarrass the best in the world, let alone, you know, someone at the end of their career. For me, who don't you want to face? He was the one that I thought, don't want to face this. There was a turning point in my career and believe it or not, people always thought that my career was just an easy one. And it wasn't. I always had to prove to everybody that I could. So I will take the... After the World Cup, I went back two years with the Under-21s. And I always went to play. I never didn't show. And we played the games against Ukraine. And we won, I think, 4-0. And I gave four assists. And David Trezeguet scored three or four goals. And, you know, before when you used to play Under-21, you used to play the same team as the A-team for the national team. Someone got injured. Who did they call? They called David Trezeguet, not me. And I said, OK, well, so you don't see my assist, so I need to score. And assist. So that's where my mind did change. Because when you play as a winger for a very long time, you go up and down and you give a ball to the striker and he grabs the glory. And I was like, OK, if I ever go back as a nine, let's not forget about assisting. Let's not forget about moving and trying to make people play and not be only the striker that's going to stay in the box and not move for others. And so one thing that's very important for me, and I always talk about my assist, and always people talk about my goals, and I always talk about my assist, because for me, it's very important. Because at one point, people started to say, strikers can do different things. Just before he left, Jerry Henry, and he said, Robin, it is your time to shine now. I was like, yeah, OK. But because I was playing as a number 10, sometimes on the wing, he said, no, no, no. He said, you have to take over my role. I said, I'm not sure. I don't think I'm a striker. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he said, no, no, no. He said, you should go for that. He said, be the main guy and work hard for it and you have it in you. I was like, OK, thanks very much. That's the issue. We've been training for half an hour. We scored a few. He just goes with his left and kills us. And we have a game tomorrow. Yo, this guy retired for 10 years. He killed my whole company. I think Jerry Henry was a proper leader too. You know, he's leading from the front, but Jerry Henry is, I would say, at this time, he wanted to be perfect. With Jerry Henry, everything has to be perfect. You have to do everything to be perfect. Move on to the captain at the time, the famous Jerry Henry. One of the best players in the world at the time. You know, playing with him was unbelievable for me. I remember, you know, when I was in Clairefontaine, he used to come and speak with us, you know, and give us advice, you know. And me, I was young, you know, I was just dreaming, you know, about being professional. And a few years later, I am in the same dressing room as him and it was unbelievable. So I've learned a lot, you know, alongside him. It's been an honour for me to play with him. And he was a good guy as well. My thing is, I need to make it to the box as quick as I can. And your thing is to keep me out of the box. Once I'm in the box, I'm the king. For me, Henry's the best I've ever played in the Premier League. And the impact he had in that Arsenal team, and his calmness, his finishing, his pace, his power. I don't think we ever seen anything like it when he first started at Arsenal. It was incredible. He's got that real aura. And he knows it. And he uses it. But not in a bad way. When he came back, that was my first thing of like, is this what these lot were like in the training, like the Invincibles or whatever. Like, he would hammer people for missing 1v1s. Like, when I say hammer, like, there's no coming back for some of them. Like, young lads going through, you know, the classic Omri on the left side, just open it up and just slot it. They'd miss. He'd go mental at them. You think that's good enough? You're never going to make it doing that. And it's like, the right person would react to that in the right way. And because it's him saying it, and if it was me, I used to be like, tell me more. Yeah. You know what I mean? What do I have to do? And then, because I was like that character, I felt in that short period of time, he helped me quite a lot. And like, giving me advice on what I needed to do. But you know, if you didn't react well to that, people would maybe think it's not familiar a bit too much. And I just looked at it as like, you were one of the best, if not the best in the prem. I'm listening to everything you're saying. The standards he had, even when he just walked back through the door, and obviously he's not the same Omri as he was then, but the expectations he put on us though, and, you know, the finishing, the stuff that he prides really high, winning, scoring, shooting competitions. Strikers are missing. He is nailing them. He was the best by far, and he had everything. His movement, he was like the silent assassin, wasn't he? He could score with his head, go short, go in behind, right and left foot. He was incredible. But literally, night before games, he would be the one play in my career that I thought, gonna be a tough day tomorrow. And you'd wake up. No one had that effect on me at all but him. At the time, he was someone that I looked to because I could see similarities with what I wanted my end goal to look like with the way that he was playing. So he was someone that I paid close detail to. And yeah, he's just a wonderful footballer and he knows his football as well. So I still listen to some of his interviews and the way he speaks about finishing. It's important for me to keep taking in that knowledge. I just try and treat my brain like a sponge, really, and just soak as much information in as I can. Thierry, Thierry, Thierry. See, when you see the long sleeves on the Arsenal shirt, you know right then, straight away, who you're coming up against. You know it's that time you've got to focus in because this guy is the end careers man in the Premier League. Actually, I played against a few of these players and Cristiano Ronaldo, what he went on to do, I played against Drogba, Wayne Rooney. A little bit cheery at the end, but I played against two or three of those players and in the main, you had good games against them. They had good games against you, but it was a battle. Thierry is the one player on that list who made me feel completely inferior that I couldn't cope really going into the games. I've never felt like that before about it, coming up against the player. Was it the physicality? Because of the skill? What was it? All of it. Because certain players, you think, oh, I can do that. I can do, you know, pace, physicality, skill. There wasn't any area I thought there was a sort of weakness, like there was a bit of chink in the armour, you could maybe get better or something like that. I got into the Premier League at 17. I won the Golden Boot at 17, won it again at 18 and then Thierry Henry came over and I looked at him and thought, I'm never going to win one of those again either. My idol was Thierry Henry. Like I always felt like when he was patting him from the left and bending it in, that was always something I... We see that, we see that. I scored one against Luton, but I felt like Henry did it frequently. Obviously, I'm not on that level yet, but yeah, he was something I wanted to, someone I wanted to be like. One player I think that you, you know, you think about with the Premier League and his impact at the time, I say Thierry Henry. Thierry Henry was the standard of his generation. What made Thierry different was that he drifted around the pitch. A lot, you know, he'd often find himself on the left wing and as a centre-back, I could never really go out there and engage with him. He'd often come inside and, you know, he could shoot, he could dribble. That made him very difficult. So unfortunately for me, yeah, Thierry Henry and the Arsenal teams that I used to play against were very difficult. I think he's the greatest player to ever play in the Premier League. Yes. He was that good. I'm agree with you. Oh, he was that good. You know, physically, he was so gifted because not often you see players that are that big and that can run, that's got skills, that can finish. But I just felt like he was just completely different to anything I'd seen before. The player that I really looked up to whilst I was a young kid growing up was Thierry Henry. Yeah, he was just so good. An unbelievable player and I always looked up to him. And even Thierry Henry, I believe is the best foreign import I've seen playing in the Premier League because he went through a three, four year period where it was the best kid in the playground by a long way. He was, his assists, his goals, he was untouchable. He went through a period that I've not seen from another Premier League footballer. Eden's always been a number I've liked. Obviously I've learned at Leeds as well and obviously Thierry as well, which obviously made the number a lot more special. In terms of what couldn't he do, what didn't he have? Someone who would get the crowd off the seat. Just a phenomenal Premier League player and he is, he is the best. Henri was, I think, the best foreign player we've ever seen and what he did, I think, for that club and the Invincibles, I think he's the best foreign player I've seen. He changed the face of the game. It was bigger than just a signing. It was guaranteeing trophies in a spell, possibly the best in Arsenal's history. Was there ever a goalkeeper that you didn't like to play against one-on-one that you thought, oh, he looks a bit bigger? Always back myself. Henri, favourite Premier League player. A footballer who transcended the sport itself. From the streets of Paris to the hallowed grounds of Highbury and the Camp Nou, he left an indelible mark on everyone who witnessed his genius. His teammates worshipped him, his rivals feared him, his coaches moulded him and his fans, they will never forget him. This was Thierry Henri. In his own words and in the words of those who knew him best, if you want to keep travelling through football's golden memories, enter The Past, a playlist of the icons who have left the pitch but never our hearts.