Me and Thierry

While many Arsenal supporters in South Africa have had their allegiences passed down to them from their fathers, my story is a little different. I can actually thank boredom, and that fact that SABC 1 showed the Premier League highlights package on a Tuesday night when I was in High School.

You see I was brought up on cricket and rugby, with little or no interaction with football in my younger years, and as such by the time I was about 13 I had no allegiances to any football team anywhere. What i did have was a TV in my bedroom, albeit with only SABC. Being the teen I was, I spent much of my "homework" time either watching 007 reruns on E, or anything else that I could find that was more interesting than algebra. So when the highlights package came on at about 11pm every Tuesday night, I had little much else to do but watch some goals by players I never heard of, for teams I never cared about.

But something in me changed one day, when I started realixing that I was no longer just staying up to watch arbitary goals, I was staying up to see something special which had caught my interest. A man by the name of Thierry Henry.

But you see while the talents of Robbie Fowler, Alan Shearer and Andy Cole were fairly apparent, there wasn't anything that caufht my eye the way Thierry did. Looking back I know it wasn't just Thierry that was special, the whole team oozed class at the time, but the epic coolness, the french swagger, the justifiable arrogance of Theirry Henry is what made me fall in love with football, and fall in love with Arsenal FC.

229 goals later and he is still making me feel like a groupie at a Justin Bieber concert.