On Thursday nights on one of the little patches of floodlit astroturf packed underneath the Westway, the giant flyover that links central London out to the west, a World Cup winner comes out to play. Robert Pires is 46 and is determined to carry on playing to the best of his ability in any way possible. He loves his regular match with his friends. Being in among the thousands of middle-aged blokes who try to roll back the years via a no holds barred 5-a-side on pitches up and down the country suits him just fine.
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Arsene Wenger once said that all you needed to do to make Pires happy was pass him a ball. Simple. “Give him a football, you have him on your side the whole day,” the former Arsenal manager observed.
This insistence on playing, on having the ball as part of his essential happiness, is part of the reason that to this day, 13 years after leaving Arsenal, he has an open invitation to train at the club whenever he wants. All he needs to do is send a text to say he would like to train the following day and when he arrives at London Colney everything is laid out in one of the dressing rooms for him. “I am like a player because I have everything,” he says. “The kit, initials RP. Clean boots. No number any more — although I know the No 7 is free…”
It is not a commonplace arrangement in football, to have a former player who does not have an official coaching role out on the pitch taking part in sessions. This is not a short-term fitness exercise for a pro down on his luck to get sorted with a new club. This is about Pires and Arsenal being so comfortable in each other’s company there is no reason not to see each other all the time. It began when Wenger was in situ so Pires felt obliged to ask if it could continue when there was a regime change. “I spoke with Unai Emery. He said, ‘OK, for you no problem. You are a legend, you are an ambassador for the club, the door is always open for you’”.
The chat, like all of their conversations, was in Spanish. Pires’s mother is from Spain and his father is Portuguese so he is fluent in four languages. Being able to communicate in a more natural way is perhaps one of the reasons Pires has time for Emery — maybe more time than some who ponder whether he ought to be running out of it given this season’s travails.
Being close to Arsenal, welcomed to drift in and out of the inner sanctum at the training ground as often as he wishes, means that he tries to spread positivity. But even so, Pires is realistic enough to accept that this season has been beset by problems that are not easy to fix. “Sometimes it is difficult to make a success,” he muses. “I can understand that some fans are disappointed. We play bad.”
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It is here that Pires’s glass-half-full attitude comes into play. “My problem is I am always confident and optimistic when I talk about Arsenal,” he says. “This team has such quality. The squad can improve this situation. The most important thing now is that Unai Emery needs to talk to the group to try to find a solution together. I hope they can, for the players, for the club, for the manager.
“I know he is having trouble. Unai is a good guy. He is a nice person. He is a good manager. He is under pressure unfortunately. Fans can’t always appreciate the details of the situation but to be a manager is very difficult, especially when you work in the Premier League. You can be a manager in Spain, France or Italy but when you come to England the intensity is totally different. It is about the fight, the spirit. The intensity is extremely difficult.”
He ponders the emotion that flared up between the crowd and Granit Xhaka and puffs out his cheeks. “When you are on the pitch, when you receive good energy from the fans you feel you can play well. If you receive bad energy, you lose your confidence. Xhaka is a good person, a good player. I know him and he loves Arsenal. But if you lose your control because you see that reaction from fans it’s a very difficult situation to be in. I understand that. Relations between players and fans is very sensitive.
“The team needs so many ingredients in the squad. Physical, technical, some players with intelligence, of course we need leadership, and we need English players.” That last one is something he is particularly keen on, which is interesting from a player who was part of a multi-cultural generation that had a phenomenal blend. Nobody could argue that Patrick Vieira or Lauren or Freddie Ljungberg did not epitomise fighting spirit as well as flair.
Pires is adamant though, having seen the influence of local players in the dressing room of his era. He has experienced first-hand how that impressed certain ideas on even the most combative players from abroad: “We need English players because we are in England and nobody else has grown up with this mentality,” he says. “You need to be born here. It’s very nice when you get to discover new countries but for me when you play in England you need English players.
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“It’s a different time. But I used to play with David Seaman, Lee Dixon, Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Ashley Cole, Ray Parlour… We’re talking about six English players in the team. We need similar players. Of course I respect the Arsenal philosophy but we are in the Premier League and it’s so tough every weekend.”
Arsenal do have a new generation of English players breaking through, with Joe Willock, Reiss Nelson, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe joining the more established band of Rob Holding, Calum Chambers and Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Overall they are not as experienced as Pires’s contemporaries but it’s a start.
“This game on Saturday against Southampton will be difficult. It will help if the fans give good energy for the team,” he notes.
Pires joined Arsenal in the summer of 2000. He famously didn’t start in the opening game of the season. Away at Peter Reid’s Sunderland did exactly what it said on the tin. Wenger decided to start his new winger on the bench in observational mode to give him an inkling of what to expect in the Premier League. Pires winced at the brutal tackles flying around in an attritional encounter. Sunderland won 1-0. Patrick Vieira was sent off in the 90th minute. Pires was under no illusions that this move would evidently be more challenging than he imagined.
Adaptation time was necessary, especially for a player known more for his technical ball mastery and imagination than an instinctive relish for the battle. Halfway though October he scored a superb equaliser away at Lazio to qualify Arsenal for the next round of the Champions League. It was a decisive moment and he began to feel he belonged. These were critical steps on the ladder to the legend status he would in future attain.
He watches Nicolas Pepe trying to adjust to English football and empathises. But while the Ivorian winger comes into a set-up that comes across as confused and doesn’t have, by the coach’s admission, emotional balance, Pires had Vieira, Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Kanu for company, with all the know-how of the English defence behind them. Pepe has to find the zone in trickier circumstances.
By the time his second season came around, Pires clicked into glorious form. Come springtime Arsenal were hurtling towards a Premier League and FA Cup double and Pires was en route to becoming the Footballer of the Year.
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Wenger remembers thinking that he had to give one of his stellar performers a rest at some point. “I still curse myself about the day he got injured in 2002,” he said. “We played Newcastle and I said to myself, I overplayed Robert. I wanted to rest him. I always said, ‘OK next game…’ We started the game and he was world class. Suddenly he hurt his cruciate. Before he was injured he was the best player in the world in his position.”
Pires missed the run-in to the moment of triumph for both domestic trophies. His team-mates all bowed to him as he attended the Premier League trophy presentation with his crutches. He missed the World Cup and had to somehow focus on his rehab.
Today, one of Pires’s uses when he trains at Arsenal is to assist the players recovering from injury. He might be doing it for his personal fitness and happiness but it also has a very direct and real use to help players on the road back to match sharpness. He spent time with Rob Holding and Hector Bellerin as they recovered from that same injury he suffered in his pomp. More recently he spent three weeks training alongside Alexandre Lacazette while the striker came back from an ankle problem.
Where a player needs to work on a specific exercise to replicate match situations, Pires can recreate those moves and passes exactly, with far more realistic precision than the coaches. “I think I have the technique, compared to the coaches, which hopefully means for the players it is better when they are training with me. We have the same technique, the same ability, the same control, the same pass. I was a professional and the coach is a coach — unfortunately for him. He is very good at his part and I respect that. The mix is important,” he says.
“I hope it’s a good help for the players coming back from injury. I know how it is. I was two times injured long term and for me it was very difficult to be alone. That’s why I can feel how they are doing, when they are alone on the field.”
His own cruciate injury changed him. He describes it — ever the optimist — as “a bad moment but in a way a good moment” because of how it made him stronger. “I worked on something new in my body but especially in my brain. In France we learn the typical academy style of technique, vision. In England you need to fight. For me it was a good moment because I fought to get back in the first team and to find my position on the field. I worked a lot on my mentality. It was very difficult because it is just the physio and you. You are like a stranger, a foreigner, to the rest of the squad. They work together over there. You are outside. I thought, OK I am alone but my target is to join the group again. My target was to work every day, every day, every day. I found a way.”
He certainly did. Pires was an integral member of Arsenal’s Invincibles who were unbeaten during the 2003-04 league campaign.
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He packed so much into his six seasons at the club that it became the place he would call home. After spells with Villarreal and, briefly, Aston Villa before seeing out his playing career with something completely different in Goa, he returned to bring up his family in London.
Getting up in the mornings and taking that familiar drive into Hertfordshire to Arsenal’s training ground, to get changed and out there with the ball at his feet, keeps him connected to the game and to his club. The dressing room he uses is, he stresses, not the first-team one any more. That needs to be a sacred space and he understands that.
But he is around the place to talk to the players, especially the youngsters trying to find their way at a time when Arsenal could do with as much positive energy as they can find. Any way he can help, Pires remains on site and on side.
(Photo: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
