Sicario2 I just said Henry’s career is marked by not scoring in 9 finals.
The comparison to Messi is instructive. Make Messi a few years older and drop him into our line-up instead of Henry back when Henry joined us from Italy, and we don't win the same league titles in the same ways.
You'd then likely have to say—despite the success I don't doubt we'd have enjoyed if we'd have had some proto-Messi playing for Wenger in his heyday—something like "Messi's career was marked by never leading Arsenal's line to an invincible league season".
Thing is, a football career is about what the footballer does and not what he doesn't do. Otherwise we would be rational to think of Messi's career in terms of what he never achieved by never playing for Arsenal—the little midget traitor. That way lies delirium.
Now, if you're the rare Arsenal supporter who's unable to make sense of Henry's brilliant career as one of the very nearly inarguable genius greats of his sport, that's a deficiency belonging to you among very, very few of us.
On the other hand, you also like to extort greatness from some of our current squad by speculating about how you will judge them harshly otherwise. As in the case of the question of Saka being "world class", which you have agreed he is since the Bernabeu, so before this current squad has even reached a hypothetical Champions League final in which Saka could fail to score.
I can kinda get how this symbolic, gestural extortion operates. While there's more glory we can imagine a player like Saka obtaining in an Arsenal shirt, it makes sense for us to hold emotion in reserve, because otherwise how would we do justice to the glory?
But in Henry's case, his time at Arsenal is long gone, so your compulsion to do him down amounts to a self-protective neurotic repetition. You're guarding yourself against a species of failure you anticipate in the present based on particular traumas in the past. I get how that works too. However, with affection and tongue firmly in cheek, I'm begging you to take yourself to therapy and tell them how Thierry Henry hurt you. 😆
