THIERRY HENRY Interview

THIERRY HENRY admits he would love to manage Arsenal one day and talks about his experiences of racism in football. He also responds to the recent racist incident between football fans on the Paris Metro.

Former professional footballer, Thierry Henry, has spoken about his experiences of racism in football and his reaction to the racist incident from Chelsea fans towards a black passenger on the Metro in France. He also spoke about his ambitions to lead his former team, Arsenal.

On about having his sights set on the manager job at Arsenal once Arsene Wenger moves on, Thierry revealed he wouldn’t say no to it: “The thing that I will say is, I don’t know what Arsene wants to do and how long he will stay, I just want to be equipped to be in the position one day maybe to be a manager… Being the manager of Arsenal football club will be a dream but let’s all be honest, I need to learn first, that’s the most important thing. It’s not because you know the game that you can teach it and I just want to learn.”

And if Arsene called him and offered him the job, Thierry said: “I can’t say no to Arsenal so I would say yes!”

Parisian, Thierry, spoke about the recent incident involving some Chelsea fans: “You can’t have a go at Chelsea because it’s difficult to control who is going to travel, you can’t have that control.”

He continued: “You play a game and you try to concentrate and keep your composure and what you hear sometimes is ‘black’ this and ’monkey’ and monkey chants and people spitting at you when you take a corner kick and it is not easy. It is not easy and that has to stop and what has to be done for it to stop, I don’t know. You need to have a zero tolerance, I believe in that. I did encounter [racism] and it is not easy to deal with I’m telling you because when you lose it [everybody is] like ‘he should know better, come on, behave!’ I am a human being and that’s not the type of thing you want to hear… It is not an easy one, we do not want to see that and it has to stop.”

Following applause from the audience, Thierry continued, “I don’t know if people think it’s a way to put a player off his game. There are other ways to put a player off his game, you don’t have to go into this type of discussion.”

On his fears about racism in the game, Thierry admitted, “At one point what I was scared about was it become a normality… I tell you one thing about the game – and that’s the game that I love and I will always protect and defend – but if you say whatever you can hear in the stadium outside the stadium, you will get in trouble. But you can say it in the stadium. I never understood that part that once you are in the stadium you can say whatever you want and that’s not on. It’s part of the game sometimes, we don’t want to kill everything also because we all love a bit of banter between the fans [but] you need to have the right balance.”

He added: “I used to love when people were booing in the right way… because that’s when I used to come alive because I used to love that when people were doubting me or thinking that I wasn’t good enough to perform,” he started but said, “when you hear the monkey chants and the spitting at you because the colour of your skin is different, because you believe in something else, because whatever it is, I think it’s not on and it should stop.”

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