Robin van Persie: 5 Possible Reasons the Dutchman Has Gone Cold for Man United

Bleacherreport.com 25/03/2013

After a barnstorming first few months at Old Trafford, things haven't been going so well for Robin van Persie recently.
The Dutchman was arguably the best player in Britain during the first half of the Premier League season, bagging goals for fun and leading the league's top scorers chart.
For a spell of 12 games between late November and late January, he failed to score in two appearances.
This has now changed for the Manchester United striker, with him having found the back of the net only once in his last seven appearances.
Why is this? What has prompted the hottest player in Britain to suddenly go cold?
Here are five possible reasons, with the likelihood of each assessed.

Burnout
Over the past two years, Robin van Persie has played more football than he has ever done in his career.
His last campaign for Arsenal was the first in which he has remained injury-free, and to date, he is yet to succumb to any major problem for the Red Devils.
He made close to 50 appearances in all competitions for the Gunners last season, and is on track for over 40 this term. The Dutchman's lean spell in front of goal could well be attributed to this factor that he is suffering from burnout.
He seems to have lost a slight edge in regards to sharpness on the ball and is reacting slower in front of goal two major signs of fatigue.

Lack Of service
It is no secret that one of Manchester United's biggest weaknesses this season has been the continued lack of form of all three first-team wingers.
Antonio Valencia's unshakable injury concerns and increasing predictability on the right flank has made him a liability, doubts remain regarding Ashley Young's ability to play at the highest level for United while Nani has only recently returned to form.
Of the Red Devils' 69 Premier League goals this term, only one was scored and nine assisted by the three combined.
Of course, this problem has been consistent throughout the season, so to suggest that Van Persie's recent woes are a direct consequence would be a bit of a stretch.

Lost Of Confidence
A player as gifted as Robin van Persie doesn't simply forget how to score, but a minor crisis in confidence could temporarily rob him of his clinical finishing.
The Dutchman's lean spell really started in early February, but it was his glaring miss in the Champions League Round of 16 first-leg clash with Real Madrid that may have escalated matters.
In an interview with Sky Sports after that game, the moment seemed to weigh heavily on his mind (h/t Goal.com).
"I had three [chances] in the second half, especially the other when I hit the bar. That was a big chance, I should have put that in. I slightly mis-kicked it, I didn't hit it properly," he said.

Inevitable Dry Spell
A possible reason for Robin van Persie's dry spell in front of goal could simply come down to a matter of inevitability.
Strikers often run hot and cold in front of goal last season the Dutchman struck just once in his final five games for the Gunners.
Earlier this season, Luis Suarez went five straight games without finding the back of the net forLiverpool. Even Gareth Bale had down periods for Tottenham Hotspur earlier this season.
The grinding and rigorous nature of the British schedule means any top player finds it increasingly difficult to maintain blistering form throughout the calendar year.
While this is not really a tangible excuse for his lack of goals, it does give fans of Manchester United hope that Van Persie could turn it all around any game now.

Pressure
Manchester United are probably the biggest club in the world. Their recent clash with Real Madrid was probably the biggest fixture of the world football calendar.
There is a possibility that Robin van Persie's recent goal drought could be as a result of him having to deal with pressures greater than he has previously faced in his career.
While there are arguments for this theory, it doesn't really hold up against further cross-examination.
The Dutchman has been equally profligate in domestic competition as well as European. He has failed to find the back of the net against the likes of Queens Park Rangers, Norwich City and Reading as well as against Real Madrid.
With the Red Devils practically home free in the Premier League, it's not as if the rarity of him competing in a title run-in is weighing heavily on his shoulders.

Wayne Rooney's 'partnership' with Robin van Persie is two lone dangers

Guardian.co.uk 08/02/2013

Manchester United pair stand near each other and score goals for the same team, but each carries a distinct, individual threat

Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie are not a partnership. They are instead two men who stand quite near one another while scoring goals for the same team. Illustration: Robin Hursthouse for the Guardian


It often used to be said that football was "a game of partnerships": a selection of quietly beavering double acts – full-backs, midfielders, centre-halves – between them bearing aloft the ideal of the team like worker ants heroically carting off a prized sandwich crust. It is the kind of statement you may find yourself wanting to be truer than it actually is.

This idea of football seems to speak to the sense of fraternal collectivism that has long been one of the sport's finer qualities, a vision of brave mud clogged men roped together on a mountainside, nobly persevering. You can see this spirit reflected even in the rectangular symmetries of English football's carefully tended version of 4-4-2, which is basically "a game of partnerships" made into a formation by a six-year-old with a crayon, but which still has something gently touching and buddyish about it.

The outrage felt by English football in the 1980s at the spectacle of overseas players turning up at Wembley and playing "in the hole" or showing off as a sweeper perhaps has something to do with the junking of this sacred partnership model, inspiring the same sense of witchy, transgressive longing normally reserved for the lone, husky voiced divorcee at a middle-class dinner party.

Rather than being about partnerships football is now something more diffuse: a rotational business of subcommittees and steering groups, sped by the rise of the hands-in-the-cake-mix manager, with his tweaks and shunts and exasperated touchline interventions. Within this top-down system the forging of a two-man partnership almost looks like an act of insubordination, the sort of thing you might get thrown out of the army for.

With this in mind it seems surprising there has this week again been some suggestion that Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie, on the back of a fine run of form for both men, have now formed a notable striking partnership. There is an important distinction to be made here. Rooney and Van Persie are not a partnership. They are instead two men who stand quite near one another while scoring goals for the same team.

There is some occasional interplay between the two, some complementary spins and turns, and a sense of a twin but distinct threat, which is of course a weapon in itself. Watching them, at times it feels as though Manchester United have two chances to score in every game, that they are effectively playing two lone strikers, simultaneous substitutes in a ghostly 4-4-(1)-(1). Either way it is undoubtedly working. Rooney has 17 goals this season and Van Persie 24. It's like football reduced to fantasy football. Buy yourself a 30-goal striker and get – 30 goals from your striker. And so Rooney and Van Persie simply get on with it courteously, discreetly, like two men quietly battering away at their laptops in the first-class carriage of a high-speed train.

At this point it is necessary to bring the tactics board creaking out from behind its oriental screen. The fact is the mere notion of twin strikers will have alt-football purists everywhere expelling a spume of Indonesian forest-floor espresso across the screen of their bespoke mini-tablet in a gargle of hipster-bearded fury. This is stone-age talk really. Modern football is a game of lone attackers, false attackers, even at a push the rotating attacker, as utilised this week by Brazil who confronted England's defence in the first half at Wembley with the revolving threat of a slow, fat, lank haired man alternating with a spindly, jumpy, carrot-haired man.

So it is with Rooney and Van Persie, modern footballers raised in more complex attacking times. Van Persie was more a second striker or left-sided attacker when he arrived at Arsenal. And if Rooney's teenage crush was Duncan Ferguson, his first and only real footballing love to date is Cristiano Ronaldo, whom Rooney seemed to adore and with whom he shared a gambolling, Brideshead-ish kind of strike-pash. It is this sense of intangible sporting warmth that is still key to the emotional appeal of the strike partnership.

Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole, the most obviously amorous out-and-out two-man strike team of recent times, were just brilliant fun to watch, going about their business like a pair of kittens chasing a ping-pong ball. Who could forget the sight of Iván Zamorano and Marcelo Salas at the 1998 World Cup, a furiously warrior-like strike duo, setting themselves on the Brazilians like a pair of Ewoks throttling to death an entire platoon of elite storm-troopers. Alan Shearer, so grouchy and sore in his late "Ozymandias" period – the vast and trunkless legs of stone – seemed likeable and quietly manly as part of a duo, the partnership with Les Ferdinand offering a sense of busy physicality, a bouncer-ish presence as though together they'd be brilliantly effective at helping you move a wardrobe upstairs or dispersing a menacing group of youths from a bus shelter. This quality of shared warmth transcends even footballing loyalties. Jürgen Klinsmann and Rudi Völler were, for some, the unacceptable face of 1990s German triumphalism, but they were transformed, unavoidably, into wonderful, prancing, moustachioed men by their obvious joy in playing together. Similarly Daniel Sturridge will, I am confident, quietly rehabilitate Luis Suárez in the wider consciousness by bringing to the fore his qualities of selfless, fraternal man-ferreting. Carlos Tevez finds his muse in fellow scurrier Sergio Agüero. Carlos, it's all forgotten.

Looking beyond the few that remain there is a kind of sadness to the lot of the modern striker, deprived of his natural mate and condemned to stalk his shrinking pasture alone. Week after week Fernando Torres looks like the loneliest jostled, jeered and entirely surrounded man on earth. But at least he once had Steven Gerrard. Jermain Defoe has basically spent the past decade running around on his own. Similarly Andy Carroll, a natural big-man, seems condemned to remain for ever incomplete, roaming unaccompanied like the last woolly mammoth on earth, baffled by the humid winds, the vanished pack ice.
Of course football has moved on, but the game of partnerships remains a seductive ideal. It is still hard not to feel a quiet attachment, a shared Morecambe and-Wise-in-the-kitchen sense of fondness for these nobly beavering duos. Sport is in so many ways about relationships: friends, families, the spectacle of shared fellowship even within the humid enclosure of the team. As Rooney and Van Persie would no doubt point out the idea of a simple old-school partnership offers a kind of constraint.
But it remains a simple and perhaps even rather guilty pleasure.

Will the Real Robin van Persie Please Stand Up?

Epltalk.com 12/04/2013

Actually, will the real Robin van Persie please score a goal? The usually prolific striker has been in a bit of a funk lately, not having scored in 10 league matches.

Looking at his goal tally in the league this season (19 goals) and his assists (8 assists), you would think he’s having a strong season — maybe not as great as last season’s monstrous season, but a strong one nonetheless.

When Van Persie made his move to Manchester United from Arsenal, many thought he would form the best striker duo in the world when paired with Wayne Rooney. And for the first part of the season, he and Rooney seemed to be working, with both strikers scoring and assisting and drawing defenses into keeping more than one defender on at least one of them at a time.

Through the first half of the season, it seemed like RVP was on course to replicate his goal scoring tally from last season, but after the winter break it seemed like something changed. The shooting boots had gone missing, and defenses seemed to take notice. They still kept extra eyes on the Dutchman, but no longer was he their main threat to score. The real showing of how little he was striking fear into opposing defenses hearts after the break was evident in the return leg of Manchester United’s Champions League tie against Real Madrid. Even with Wayne Rooney on the bench, the Madrid defense treated Van Persie like any other striker they have faced. Instead of double teaming him and trying to make sure he didn’t get shots off, they kept regular eyes on him, not opting to double team. They also dared him to try from distance, and that is where most of his shots were during that game. For a player that was possibly the best striker in the world for half of a season, this was an abysmal showing.

All is not looking downward for RVP this half of the season though. In the league, he still draws extra attention because most defenses know once he nets one goal, there is a great chance he will get going and rack up the goals again. His body language doesn’t look like the body language of a confident striker anymore. The swagger he had in the beginning part of the season has seemed to fade away, and he looks like he is trying to force the goals instead of letting them come naturally. Still though, he is a regular starter for Manchester United and having him on the field is more beneficial than having him off the field if for no other reason than the attention he draws.


So I’ll ask the question again, will the real Robin van Persie please stand up? The United fans are itching to sing “Oh Robin Van Persie” and not moan “Ugh, Robin Van Persie.”