When the news broke about the former Arsenal and France international star Thierry Henry hanging up his football boots and joining the TV punditry team on Sky Sports, a lot of us took that to mean that he would not be coming back to the Gunners to work with Arsene Wenger in some capacity after all, as many of us had hoped.
But the 37-year old has moved quickly to allay our disappointment and declare that he does intend to get into the coaching and managerial side of the game he loves and has lit up as a player. And as an ESPN report reveals, Henry is hoping to do that in north London and I don’t mean at White Hart Lane.
The Frenchman with Va Va Voom is planning on taking his coaching badges and it sounds as though he is pretty keen to get started. Henry admits that there is no guarantee that he will prove to have what it takes to be a successful manager like his old mentor Arsene Wenger, but he is hoping so because that could mean that Henry could fulfill another of his dreams, to manage the Gunners one day.
Thierry said, “That would be a dream come true [to manage Arsenal], but that’s not how it works.
“You have to prove yourself first, you have to learn first. You need to be able to understand what it is to be a manager.
“Can you teach, can you be patient? All these problems. People think they are all managers in their own way, but it’s not that easy.
“The plan is to start my badges and I guess Arsenal will help me. To pass your badges, you have to work closely with a club and I would like to think it is going to be Arsenal. You know I’m in London when you see me at Arsenal.
“First and foremost I don’t know how or when, but everybody knows I would love to go back to Arsenal in some capacity. But I need to be equipped to go back. I want to learn the process, so I have to get my badges and what not. We will see what is going to happen.
“It’s not a secret, everybody talks about me going back to Arsenal and me the same thing, but it doesn’t always work like that. First and foremost, I have to make sure that I have everything on board to be able to go back.
“Hard work is all I know. It comes from my dad and the guys I played with when I arrived in the national team. [Zinedine] Zidane, [Youri] Djorkaeff, [Lilian] Thuram, [Marcel] Desailly, [Emmanuel] Petit, [Fabien] Barthez, that’s how they were and that’s what they taught me.
“So I took it on board because you can only be the reflection of your education. That’s the way I was educated, so that’s what I’m going to try to pass on.”
And Henry’s ambition do not stop at just following in Wenger’s footsteps at Arsenal, he also dreams of leading us one day to the Champions League glory he so narrowly missed as an Arsenal player. Do you think Henry will turn out to be as good a manager as he was a player?