How Long Will It Take RVP to Get Fully Comfortable with Manchester United?
Simon Edmonds@@Eddie_Edmonds
Correspondent ISeptember 5, 2012
There’s probably a lot of you reading that title right now, thinking to yourselves, "what does he mean “get comfortable?! RVP has already scored four times in less than two and a half full appearances! How much more comfortable can you get?"
Well, those people would have a very valid reason for perhaps wondering what exactly I’m getting at.
On the surface, van Persie has managed to acclimatise to the system at United reasonably quickly for a new signing.
This may be due heavily in part to the fact that the Dutchman has spent his entire career in this division, and unlike a player coming from one of the other top leagues in Europe, did not have the same type of nerves surrounding adjustment to English football that they might have done.
But can this assuredness for the league van Persie is playing in be factored in as the main reason as to why he has started so well for the Red Devils, as opposed to actually fully comprehending the way that they play football?
In my opinion, it’s a pinch of one and a dash of the other.
When you sign a player who was the previous season’s leading goal scorer in the Barclays Premier League, you would be incredibly unlucky not to start seeing instant results.
Unlike the Fernando Torres case—where Chelsea signed a very out-of-form player—van Persie was always likely to start with a flourish for the club.
However, I don’t think even with that being the scenario many people could have imagined that after two matches and a 20-minute runaround at Goodison Park, RVP would be sitting pretty as the joint leader in the race for the Golden Boot with a whopping four goals.
No matter how good or in-form a player is, he won't be scoring goals that regularly unless he has a decent level of understanding of what’s going on around him.
It seems that van Persie has slipped into the lone forward role as well as anyone who has made just two starting appearances can do.
In regards to this aspect of his game, he should be fully up to speed with the rest of the team before the end of September at the latest.
But there’s something that a lot of people at United seem to have chosen to overlook in his arrival at Old Trafford.
Being “comfortable” at a club doesn’t necessarily just revolve around the actual football being played.
As a decent—and one would hope, virtuous—human being, RVP is subject to the emotions that we would all feel when leaving an important part of our life behind.
Let alone leaving that part of your life for something that it hates—in this case, going from Arsenal to Manchester United.
I’m aware that van Persie is a professional footballer. This is his career, and he shouldn’t have to take into account other people’s feelings when it comes to deciding how and where he wants to live.
But as anyone could tell you, making a jump from one side to another like this is never an easy thing to do.
The question is, how long will it take before that guilt at leaving behind the adoring Gunners fans subsides, and he can truly start to embrace being a Manchester United player in full spirit?
This is something that has a much less definite answer, and in truth can only be answered by van Persie himself.
Undoubtedly, however, if the goals do keep coming as regularly as they have been in his short spell at the club so far, that could be sooner rather than later.
Perhaps RVP can get some closure on the matter when United take on Arsenal for the first time this season.
That fixture is on November 3.
I’m confident that van Persie will put in blinding performances from now until then. But perhaps not until this day will van Persie truly be fully comfortable, deep down, wearing the red of Manchester United.