Theo Walcott suggests Robin van Persie and £5m player had a fight when they were at Arsenal
Arsenal have had their fair share of drama over the years.
Indeed, while the Gunners are one of the most professional and prestigious clubs in England, tensions can still very much boil over in north London, and we’ve seen that a few times.
Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira had some famous scuffles, there was the whole ‘pizzagate’ scandal, while, sometimes, there’s even infighting.
Pascal Cygan and Kolo Toure once had a fight at Arsenal, while David Seaman and Patrick Vieira kicked off once upon a time.
Now, Theo Walcott has shared the story of another fight at Arsenal.
Theo Walcott shares Arsenal fight story
Walcott says there was a bit of a scuffle between two Arsenal players back in 2012 after a win against Manchester City.
The winger told an interesting story about how this all unfolded.
@theowalcottTalking disagreements in the dressing room 👀 #Arsenal
♬ original sound – Theo Walcott
“Disagreements. There’s always disagreements everywhere, every football club. This one particularly.
“We were playing Man City. Actually Mikel Arteta scored a great goal, player of the match as well, come in after the game. Two players, and then over they are. I won’t say who they are yet. Well, I won’t at all. I won’t disclose their names.
“But one wanted to go for the Golden Boot, which is fair enough. The other one went through and didn’t score. Anyway, come in, we went 1-0, all happy, but not the Golden Boot player. And basically there was a bit of an incident, shall we just say. And the players were kind of breaking it all up, but what was really great to notice, because I was in the distance watching this as well, because I was on the side, was that Arsène Wenger just slowly just, like, sneaking past, like out of shot, because he hated confrontation.
“But what was great as well, we’d just beaten Man City, Arteta comes in with the trophy, player of the match, like all happy. It’s like tumbleweeds. It’s like, what’s going on here? We just won. And yeah, that was probably the quietest. Yeah, it was an interesting environment after that. But, well, they kissed made up afterwards, all fine.”
The incident in question
Walcott tried his best to hide the names of the players involved here, but it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to identify those involved.
Only one Arsenal player was going for the Golden Boot in the 2011/12 season – Robin van Persie, and if you rewatch that game there’s a clear moment when Aaron Ramsey is going through on goal and the midfielder doesn’t square the ball to Van Persie.
Ramsey was a senior player in the side in his own right by that time having joined from Cardiff for £5m years prior.
There have been rumours of this bust-up doing the rounds online for years, and now, it would appear that the cat is well and truly out of the bag on this one.