Jamie Vardy the movie is going to end up with more false climaxes than Terminator. Somewhere right now a scriptwriter is probably scratching his head and muttering: “Arsenal? Bloody Arsenal. What sort of an ending is that? If we want to keep the feelgood factor we might have to close with the title party, the footballer of the year award or the bit where he scores the winning goal at Euro 2016.”
That is the trouble with real-life fairy stories. It is not that there is no possibility of living happily ever after, more that there is no fixed point of conclusion. The story moves on, for better or worse. Other stuff happens. Mistakes can be made.
That is not for a moment to suggest that Vardy moving to Arsenal would be a mistake, though he now has a difficult decision to make. Turning down Arsenal would be great for the film script, he could trample his release clause into the dust like Gary Cooper does with the sheriff’s badge at the end of High Noon, but that might be a mistake too. Vardy could stay at Leicester and find the rest of the team breaking up around him. Or the team might stay together and collectively find life much harder next season, with opponents sitting deep and refusing to grant any space to be exploited behind their back line.
Should Vardy make a £20m move to a club as grand as Arsenal and a manager as keen on pace and a clinical touch as Arsène Wenger, it would be a classic Boy’s Own denouement to a story that already reads like schoolboy fiction. But only if Arsenal win something. If Vardy can provide the magic ingredient, the missing link, the dash of street-toughened steel that Wenger’s polished teams have been missing for so long, then all well and good. Great story, great ending. But if he struggles to make an impact, as he plainly did with England on Thursday, or if Arsenal cannot work the Leicester trick of playing without the ball and soaking up endless pressure until the opportunity arises to strike lethally with two or three passes, it will not quite be the outcome everyone hoped.
What everyone was actually hoping for – come on now, admit it – was for Leicester to keep their side together for at least another season and see how the tactics that brought them the title went down in the Champions League. Without Vardy, one fears, or without Riyad Mahrez, for that matter, Leicester would lose a lot of their element of surprise. N’Golo Kanté is another player much admired, not least by Arsenal, though he would not surprise Champions League clubs to the same extent. Though integral to Leicester’s success he is simply good at what he does in a way that has been seen before. Vardy and Mahrez are the team’s space invaders, the slippery customers, players who announce what they intend to do beforehand but still prove fiendishly difficult to stop. My colleague Barney Ronay, reporting on the 3-1 win at Manchester City that proved so pivotal to their title campaign, described the Leicester style to a T. “They played here as they always do, defending deep with heart and craft then surging forward like a pack of black-shirted ferrets.”
Ferrets in Europe is the obvious sequel, but will it be the same if the chief ferret is in Europe with the Gunners? Wenger must know what he wants from a player, after all this time, and has always had a good eye for the sort of performer who would complement his team and fit into the overall plan, but bearing in mind the fox in the box strategy turned out to be a blind alley, does he really need a ferret on the field?
Vardy’s fellow ferret, Mahrez, would have seemed a more natural choice for Arsenal. Stylish, cultured, imaginative, French-speaking: all the things Vardy is not. Wenger has spoken in the past of his admiration for Mahrez, even admitting he would barely have dared sign an unheralded player for as little as £500,000, yet when the time comes to spend an Arsenal-sized amount of money on a new forward he plumps for the less lavishly talented but undeniably impressive former Stocksbridge Park Steels man. And Vardy would be going for considerably more than £20m if he was in his mid-twenties rather than approaching his 30th birthday.
It just goes to show that you cannot beat a reliable goalscorer, whatever the age. Arsenal did not do too badly with Ian Wright (approaching 28 when he signed), after all. Vardy still has his decision to make, but Arsenal’s interest only increases the pressure on Roy Hodgson to play to his real strengths in France. England’s real strengths in the attacking department being Vardy and Harry Kane, with Dele Alli not far behind. That was not evident against Portugal and it was Wright who led the criticism, claiming that Vardy was either too deep or too wide to be effective in front of goal.
If the 2015-16 season proved anything, it is that Vardy is effective in front of goal. The challenge for Hodgson, and perhaps for Wenger next season, is to set up a team in a way that maximises his opportunities rather than muffles his impact.
