Robin ready to join the superheroes

Henry, Vieira, Pires... Arsène Wenger has a formidable record for spotting, then developing, exceptional talent. Many at Highbury think the next in line is a 22-year-old Dutchman who arrived at Arsenal with a reputation for being difficult. Robin van Persie talks to Sam Wallace about learning lessons, sendings-off and deferring to Dennis Bergkamp

When they come to hand out the squad numbers at Arsenal next summer, there will be a major decision facing Robin van Persie and he has already decided that his answer will be "No". But his response will not be an act of insubordination or a moment of rebellion; it will be the moment when the Arsenal striker exerts his own personality and, at a critical point in his club's history, dares to do things his own way.

Dennis Bergkamp leaves next summer after 11 years at Highbury and the departure of Van Persie's fellow countryman, and occasional strike partner, could well be the occasion for Wenger to offer his young Dutch striker Arsenal's famous No 10 shirt. It is an inheritance that few young players would be able to resist. An offer that all those promising Arsenal academy players, plucked from around the world and straining to catch the eye of their manager, would recognise as Wenger's supreme endorsement. Van Persie's answer will be simple: he does not want the shirt.

He has too much "respect", he says, for a player who - and Van Persie quotes this statistic without missing a beat - has scored 118 goals for the club in his time at Highbury. And he does not want to be regarded as a replacement for Bergkamp either because he is a footballer who, in his 22 years, has learnt to prize the quality of independence. He chooses his tone carefully and it is polite but firm. "I think if the boss says next season, 'I want you to wear No 10', I will say 'No'," Van Persie says. "Dennis has been the No 10 for the last 11 years and you have to respect that and be your own man."

Arsenal's No 11 is not just his own man, but travels to Bolton today as arguably the country's most in-form footballer. His goal against Reading in the Carling Cup on Tuesday night was his eighth in eight games and, while crisply smashed from the edge of the area, it was still no match for his effort against Blackburn last Saturday. To score what Highbury regards as a beautiful goal is to labour under the Premiership's most exacting aesthetic standards and yet the run and shot that Van Persie dispatched past Brad Friedel were in keeping with a great tradition. It was a resounding affirmation of the faith that Wenger has placed in him.

He starts every season, he says, "from zero" and after the summer he has endured this year that will have been a relief. Any discussion of the investigation into well-documented allegations of wrongdoing in the Netherlands this summer - for which he spent two weeks in custody without ever being charged - is off limits. The Dutch police are unlikely, it now seems, to recommend a prosecution. It is the scope of his Highbury education that absorbs Van Persie and how he came to be Thierry Henry's new strike partner little more than a year after a difficult exit from Feyenoord, the club he joined in his early teens.

Van Persie came to England with the reputation of a difficult young man, one unable to shake off the reputation of a rough-hewn street footballer who was never happier than playing in the fiercely competitive impromptu games of Kralingen, the district of his home town Rotterdam in which he was raised.

Once at Arsenal he watched Robert Pires and realised, he says, "that's the 10 per cent extra I needed". He dropped a few of the tricks that Feyenoord had allowed him to indulge in. His fitness improved dramatically after an initial shock when he joined - "the intensity of the training was so high I thought, 'Jesus, what is happening?'" But nothing has taught him more than his sending-off against Southampton on 26 February that even provoked Wenger into publicly berating him.

Van Persie is a serious young man, but when he has finished listing the changes that dismissal forced him to adopt he concludes with a grin that in retrospect that ordeal at St Mary's was a "good day". "It was a big learning point for me because those two tackles were, in my eyes, two yellow cards, it was a normal sending-off," he says. "But it was so important to me that it happened and it opened my eyes. I am still unproven now but I feel I am getting better and better - in the way I play, my technique and deciding what is most important for me and for the team.

"That was a turning point for me in how to see football. Football is a nice sport - I do it because I love it - but if you think about football and your actions you find you will be a better player. At that moment I started thinking, 'What do I want from football?' And there was a lot I had to improve: my play in the midfield, my runs. A lot had to be much better. And that red card opened my eyes, so it was a good day for me."

If that was a departure from the truculent young player who came to Arsenal in the summer of last year for a fee of £2.75m, then, in Van Persie, there will also for ever be a part of the footballer raised on the streets of Kralingen. His parents, both artists, separated when he was younger and although he says he enjoys a "fantastic" relationship with his mother, José Ras, he lived with his father, Bob, for most of his childhood.

Playing football for eight hours a day, every day, he gravitated towards Rotterdam's Surinamese and Moroccan communities and learnt to speak some Arabic. His wife, Bouchra, is Moroccan as is his best friend Nouredine Boukhari, of Ajax, one of seven professional footballers who, Van Persie says proudly, grew up in Kralingen within three streets of each other.

"I was always outside, always playing football and enjoying it," Van Persie says. "When you get older in life things come to you, problems whatever, if you are 14, 15 you don't have any money - you don't need money - you don't have paperwork, you only have football and you enjoy the game. I am really happy that I got to know the culture of Surinamese and Moroccan people as well as Dutch people. I think that is good as you develop as a human. If you are on the streets all day you see a lot of good things and a lot of bad things. I look back and I think I had a very nice time."

After street football in Kralingen came a professional contract with Feyenoord and the gradual disintegration of his relationship with the coach, Bert van Marwijk, who gave him his debut at De Kuip when Van Persie was aged just 17. There is one story about Van Persie's time there that symbolised the confidence that he took straight from his childhood into his professional career and it took place against RKC Waalwijk when, as Feyenoord's star striker Pierre van Hooijdonk lined up a free-kick he found himself usurped. Without bothering to wait for an invitation, Van Persie hit the ball himself.

Van Persie smiles at the memory - his shot did not go in - but insists that he was "feeling good at the time". "I still think he could have been a bit more polite, he could have said 'OK take it' ... but now I can say, 'Robin, maybe you should have let that free-kick go'. It [the position] was fantastic for me. It was for a left-footed player but he was the free-kick taker and he made a big problem out of it. That's OK... I think it would have been the smart thing to let him take it.

"For me it was no big problem, those kinds of things happen - I learnt from that moment. Only the guys who play a lot on the streets know how it is. For example, on the streets you play four against four and some days if it is hot in the summer there are 15 teams waiting to play. If you lose you have to wait and sometimes you wait an hour. A team will come along and say, 'No, it's our turn'. If you don't stand up for yourself you are not going to play all day."

At Arsenal, Van Persie joined a squad of sufficient reputation for even him to defer to on free-kick responsibilities and his insistence that playing alongside Henry and Bergkamp is an "honour" appears genuine. After a season which ended strongly with two goals in the FA Cup semi-final against Blackburn Rovers he resolved this year to be, in his words, "more major".

"A lot of young players play one game fantastic and the next game a bit sloppy," he says, "that's what I saw last season and that's what I wanted to change this season."

"I am waiting for the boss and when he thinks Robin is really ready for it that's up to him. If he says that I am ready for the big games as well then I will be there. In England you have a lot of games and a lot of big games as well. For example, I didn't start the big, big games against Manchester United [in the Premiership last season]. But that's no problem, the boss has to choose the best team and I imagine he will pick Dennis and Thierry up front. That's not a strange decision. Every game I play I want to do something for the team and do everything it takes to make a good impression."

Van Persie is under contract until 2008 and he says that his advisers have already opened talks with the club about a new deal - "We both have the intention to sign a new contract and then I will stay four or five years more, and I think if I say that then I will stay" - although he is open about the departure of Patrick Vieira in the summer.

"The loss of Vieira was huge because he was a big, big player in my eyes and off the pitch he was the leader as well," he says. "If you watched him day in, day out then you knew he was a leader and he had a huge impact on the team. When you are playing alongside him against other sides and see him before match in the tunnel then you feel stronger.

"I think our younger players are very grown up. I know some players in Holland who are at the same age but they are not even close to the level of, for example, Philippe Senderos, Cesc Fabregas and Mathieu Flamini.

"I am pleased to see the [difference in] level there and here with young players. Senderos is 20 and he is playing like a guy of 26, 27."

Now that Van Persie has graduated to the senior Netherlands team, and has every chance of being at the World Cup finals, it seems worth trying out on him the Vieira theory that every player at Arsenal hates Ruud van Nistelrooy. "He is just a quiet guy who loves football from what I see," Van Persie says of his Dutch team-mate. "He loves the game and he dreams, eats and thinks scoring goals."

In two weeks' time Van Persie will hope that he is in contention to start against Chelsea when his national team coach, Marco van Basten, will be able to make a judgement on the competing claims of the Arsenal striker and Arjen Robben for a place on the left wing of the Netherlands World Cup team. In his home country Van Persie is still regarded as a left-sided player and he sees the main competition as Robben, a player he first met in the junior national sides until playing with him in an Under-21 team that also included Ajax's Rafael van der Vaart and Wesley Sneijder. "We had a fantastic team but we lost every match," Van Persie says. "Everybody was thinking, 'What's happening here?"

His father, Bob, will be in London for the Chelsea match - he comes for the big games regardless of whether Robin is playing or not - and, as Highbury welcomes its old rivals for the last time, he may well find inspiration in the surroundings. Bob's pictures are almost exclusively of stands of football fans made from recycled newspaper, although his son will hope that his eye is drawn to what he accomplishes on the pitch.

"Chelsea are eight points ahead if we win the spare game. Then I think there is a chance for us because Chelsea will lose points too - I am sure of that," Van Persie says. He talks with a degree of resignation about the scrutiny under which his career has developed, although he concedes, "this is life and I accept it". He does, however, appear to have found a manager under whom he is happy to learn. Even if he does retain just enough of the rebellious young street footballer within him to say "No" to one question in particular.

Wenger's hits... and his misses

SUCCESS STORIES

* Thierry Henry

Signed from Juventus for £10.5m (August 1999). Arsène Wenger turned the winger into one of the world's best strikers. Games 308 Goals 192

* Patrick Vieira

Wenger's first signing from Milan reserves (summer 1996) for £3.5m, helped Arsenal dominate Premiership (with Manchester United) for 10 years. Left for Juventus (£13.7m) this year. Games 407 Goals 34

* Robert Pires

After quiet first season following £6m transfer from Marseilles in 2000, Pires caught fire in 2002, cutting in from the left to score and create vital goals, and help Arsenal win first League title since 1998. Games 253 Goals 77

FAILURES FILE * Francis Jeffers

Wenger spent £8m in 2001 on 19-year-old from Everton. But after only four League starts in four seasons, Jeffers was sold to Charlton in 2004 for £2.6m. Games 39 Goals 8

* Richard Wright

£6m summer buy from Ipswich (2001)to replace ageing David Seaman. Made mistakes and sold to Everton (£3.5m) in July 2002; now reserve goalkeeper. Games 22

* Jermaine Pennant

The one that got away? Incisive winger bought for £2m in 1999 at age 16 from Notts County. After six years in reserves and various loans, sold July 2005 to Birmingham for £2.5m, with reputation as a difficult player. Games 26 Goals 3