Arsene Wenger has bought the right type of striker.
Eduardo da Silva is what was missing last season. He’s exactly what Arsenal need. He will be good for Hleb, great for Fabregas, and Walcott can learn from him.
Very few goalscorers in the global marketplace can do a specialised job with the refrigerated skills Eduardo has shown when scoring all those goals for Croatia and Dinamo Zagreb.
At 24, Eduardo has demonstrated a level of finishing finesse similar to Jimmy Greaves and Robbie Fowler, a level of supercool artistry that we associate with Romario, Tostao and Zico.
The current Arsenal team play a more short-passing game than Wenger’s champions of 1998 and 2004, so they need a short-pass player rather than a power player, a poacher rather than a speed-machine, a box artist rather than a six foot centre forward. Eduardo wants to play in the box, which is quite unusual because few of Wenger’s players have ever really wanted to play in the box, apart from Freddie Ljungberg.
The new man should be in his prime over the next four years. He is joining a big club at a time when his career needs to move to the next level. So while Arsenal need Eduardo, Eduardo definitely needs Arsenal – it’s a marriage based on mutual attraction. At Zagreb he was trying to get into the last 32 of the Champions League, and his talents really deserve a stage in the last eight of the Champions League.
Croatia’s Under-21 coach Slaven Bilic rated Eduardo highly and he scored eight goals in 12 appearances for the Under-21 side.
When Bilic took over the senior team in 2006, after the World Cup in Germany, he promoted Eduardo, who duly scored seven goals in 12 full internationals, proving that the step up to senior level, which is a huge jump, far bigger than most fans realise, was something he could handle. I met Bilic when he played for Croatia against England at Wembley and he is a smart guy who played centreback for a national team that finished third in the ’98 World Cup. So he has played against top strikers himself for many years. He knows what he is talking about.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, emigrating to Croatia at 15, Eduardo da Silva suffered culture-shock and climate-shock, but had the character to persevere and make it as a pro in European football.
An instinctive footballer whose anticipation and precise finishing are astonishing by any standard, Eduardo can score goals without looking. He doesn’t just have a freakish degree of eye-foot co-ordination, he also has a freakish degree of spatial awareness when it comes to knowing where the goalposts are.
Eduardo is about five foot ten, left-footed and exceptionally nimble, and his heading technique is the best since Alan Gilzean. A natural goalscorer, like Jimmy Greaves and Robbie Fowler, he makes the hard part of football look easy. He will score hat-tricks. Not straight away, not in August, but Eduardo will score hat-tricks. In September he will score Goal of the Month.
That’s all I can say today, really. Eduardo reminds me of Fowler. And he reminds me of when I talked to Aston Villa defender Ugo Ehiogu at Bisham Abbey, where England train. I can’t recall much of what we said, only that I knew Ugo had faced Robbie Fowler many times, so I asked about playing against Fowler.
Myles : “What is it that makes this fella so lethal?”
Ugo : “His sharpness. “
I reckon that’s what makes Eduardo special. He is razor-sharp. His reactions and touches show a very high degree of concentration and precision. Many strikers look as if they want to score but this guy looks as if he knows he will score.
Too often last season Arsenal produced sweet passing and had 65% possession but no end product. Rosicky didn’t score enough, Hleb didn’t shoot enough, the main strikers were injured, and the supporters suffered. Eduardo will change all that. Eduardo = end product.
On his own, of course, he cannot make a bad Arsenal team good but he could make a good team great. If Arsenal are a good team, Eduardo will be a great goalscorer and, at times, a scorer of great goals. And he could score the goals that win the European Cup, something that Thierry Henry was never gonna do.
However, buying players is not an exact science, even for an ace talent-spotter like Arsene Wenger. But when he gets it right, excitement follows. When Wenger was at Nagoya, David Dein sent him tapes of every Arsenal game, and the Professor analysed the action, and soon realised that Arsenal urgently needed a certain type of player. They needed a big No.4 who could motor up and down and win it and supply Bergkamp, so he signed Patrick Vieira, a powerful two-footed gladiator who could tackle and pass and run away from his opponents with the ball.
In 1997, he sold Paul Merson and signed Marc Overmars, who could time his runs off the ball as well as dribble at high speed. Overmars, a Porsche racing away from two Rolls Royces, made a big difference and Arsenal won the double.
Vieira and Overmars were exactly the right players to buy in 1996 and 1997 and Eduardo, who cost only £7 million plus add-ons up to £2 million, might become as important as those two legends. We shall see.
Yesterday Wenger said, “He has great qualities and will integrate very well into our style of football. He is a very good finisher and although he is predominantly a striker, he is a very adaptable player.
“I have known about him for a while, but his performances against us in last year’s Champions League really showed what a dangerous player he is. Da Silva is a pacy, intelligent player. Also, he is hardworking and has a very good team ethic to his game. Eduardo will be a great asset for us and we are all looking forward to him joining up with us.”