A banner high up at the Emirates reads: ‘You can’t buy class’. To which the unfortunate response is: ‘Yes. But you can buy prolific strikers.’ That is what Manchester United did last summer when they signed Robin van Persie and if reason were personified for the 21 points dividing the Premier League champions from the perpetually deflating Gunners, it would be found in the form of RVP.
It is possible, if difficult, for a club’s darling to elope, then return, slap their former team about the chops, wiggle their hiney and still be greeted with teary fondness — as Cristiano Ronaldo showed when he came back to Old Trafford with Real Madrid in the Champions League earlier this season.
But Van Persie has not pulled off the same trick. It is true that he joined his former team-mates for a friendly feed in the Arsenal dressing room after yesterday’s match. (Arsene Wenger joked, entirely Frenchly, that this was because the food is better in the home changing rooms.) But there was no metaphorical bread to be broken with the Gooners on the terraces.
Every time he touched the ball during yesterday’s 1-1 draw, Van Persie was booed. It began when he trotted out through the guard of honour and continued until he walked down the tunnel when the match was over.
“You’re a chump, Rob-in, you’re a chump,” sang the fans, although the word wasn’t chump and the words were set to the tune of Kum Ba Yah, an arrangement that I feel always blunts the hostile sentiment of football songs. Handfuls of mocked-up £50 notes fluttered into the air, a gesture of deepest contempt: mercenary, turncoat, glory grubber, Judas.
But none of this distracted the Dutchman, perhaps on account of the nerve-settling effects of a first championship medal coming his way. Although his first shot on goal went near vertical, the penalty he speared past Wojciech Szczesny at the end of the first half was cool and true, as mechanical and deadly as a harpoon. When the ball went in I was looking eagerly for the sight of Van Persie doing the Cristiano Ronaldo ‘look — I’m not celebrating’ gesture of flapping both hands by the sides as if patting down the sofa cushions, while crinkling up the nose as if smelling something particularly noxious.
Alas, it was not forthcoming. On the other hand, RVP definitely didn’t celebrate, which was classy. So apparently you can buy that after all. Who’d a thunk it?
