At Everton, Theo Walcott has a chance to be something besides a failed wonderkid

There probably won’t be a stranger sight all season. Not Theo Walcott playing football; that’s relatively normal, even if hasn’t happened much this season. Nor the specifics, which were also pretty mundane. Some busy running around on the right wing, a perfect cross to nobody in particular, a nod-down to the striker. No, it was the fact that he was doing all of the above while wearing the blue shirt of Everton.

Or to put it another way — a blasphemy, this; a category error; a ragged tear in the skein of reality — he wasn’t wearing the red-and-white shirt of Arsenal.

Sure, he’s smiling on the outside, but we know what’s going on. Walcott is now a footballing orphan, trudging through the bleak early chapters of a Roald Dahl book. Wrenched by brute circumstance from the place he belonged, from the family he suited and who suited him. Dispatched to the bleak care — if you can call it that — of Sam Allardyce, both Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. Admittedly, this conceit rather flounders when we realise that Wayne Rooney would make a terrible violin-playing grasshopper and also that Walcott is 28.

Another strange-looking thing there: ”Walcott is 28.” It’s a versatile sentence. Stress the first word or the last — “Walcott is 28” — and you’ve got a terrible reminder that time is slipping away faster than we can ever hope to appreciate. The boy who went to the World Cup by accident is now full-grown. Soon Walcott will be 30. Then he’ll be retiring. And then he’ll be cropping up as a pundit, and that’s going to be really weird.

But stress the middle word — “Walcott is 28” — and with a slow shake of the head and a rueful tone, you’ve got something different. A censure, almost. Because when it comes to Walcott, it’s not just the tick-tock of mortality. It’s the lingering sense that Walcott is still, despite his age, despite his more than 400 professional appearances, despite his goals and his England caps and his really quite acceptable career, in some sense waiting to round himself out.

Maybe it’s just frustration by association. After all, Walcott’s been present for all of the late Wengerian period of Arsenal’s history, which dates roughly back to the complicated spell in the mid-noughties when Roman Abramovich moved in across town and Arsenal left Highbury for the Emirates. As the club morphed from team to be feared into team to be mocked; as they clattered out of Europe and slumped out of title races; Walcott’s been there. Somewhere. On the wing, up front, on the bench, in the treatment room.

More likely, it’s a question of mutual amplification. Even complicity, since Walcott’s been an active participant in most of the above, doing as his team was doing. Hitting the high notes from time to time but never quite sorting out the rhythm and occasionally collapsing in a discordant heap. It’s fair to wonder how long Walcott might have lasted if Wenger had been replaced a while ago, and a new manager arrived with a new broom. But equally, it’s interesting to wonder how Walcott might have developed at a different, fundamentally more sensible club, with another coach calling the shots.

Finally, there’s a sense of expectation unfulfilled and perhaps overinflated. Hope, and its hysterical sibling hype. To briefly indulge in some Allardyce-like renationalisation, if a player like Walcott had arrived in the Premier League from elsewhere and had much the same career, he’d have been happily filed away as talented but mercurial. And he would perhaps have ended up at Everton much sooner.

Instead, he started out as a double-protege, the future of both Arsenal and England, and as a result his work, good and bad, has been haunted by the ghosts of futures unwisely promised.

Anyway, he has a new manager now and new teammates. Allardyce, having lost the England job, is gathering England’s former wonderkids to himself. Walcott was “tempted” to Everton by Rooney, who told his new colleague that “Everton are really going to improve.” Whether that improvement arrives, and the role Walcott plays, is likely to be one of the more intriguing subplots of the second half of the season.

So what is Allardyce going to do with him?

Even if Walcott isn’t as quick as he was, he did score 19 goals last season, which suggests he can still finish when he gets the chance. But Cenk Tosun has arrived for decent money, and Allardyce has warned Walcott that he can’t be guaranteed a central role. His first start, against West Brom, came out on the wing.

More important than his position, though, is that he gets to play: this most Arsenal of players under the guidance of this least Arsenal of managers, with the prize of a World Cup squad place to be won. We might not get treated to a full heel turn, with Walcott discovering his elbows and his inner Kevin Davies, but it’s worth remembering that Allardyce has proved capable of recycling the discards of bigger clubs. Perhaps Allardyce will end up playing some small part in picking England’s World Cup squad. Or perhaps results will continue to tank, and he’ll be out of a job by April.

Either way, Walcott, all of a sudden, has a little time on his side. He is, after all, a mere 28; near the top of the hill but certainly not over it. A confusing age for an Arsenal prospect but a perfectly acceptable one for somebody who can now, perhaps, get on with being a footballer.