Ian Wright was a fox outside the box, never mind inside. The majority of his goals were scored with the explosive aggression that defined his career, but he was also a specialist in the most cunning type of finish, the chip or lob. It was those goals which provided the most memorable demonstrations of one of Wright’s greatest qualities: his imagination.

When he scored with a looping snapshot from 20 yards against Manchester United in the 1993 Charity Shield, the Sky commentator Martin Tyler exclaimed: “Wright! Och! How does he do it? How does he do it?” The question ostensibly referred to Wright’s execution, but it carried an equally important, if less catchy, implication: how does he even come up with the idea to do it?

Wright’s imagination, not to mention his technical ability, enabled him to sit right in the middle of the Venn diagram of great goalscorers and scorers of great goals. Everybody will have a favourite. His finest was possibly the outrageous solo effort against Everton in 1993, which showed that even the route-one goal can be a thing of undeniable beauty. Yet there is something so Wright about the no-look chip against Leeds two years later. It was a perfect teaser for the portfolio of a man who scored unique goals that were somewhere between unforeseeable and unimaginable.

Wright’s chip completed an ultimately emphatic 3-0 defeat of a decent Leeds side, and had the grizzled gentlemen (it was 1995) of the press cooing about Arsenal. They were starting afresh under an exciting new manager, who was attempting to change their DNA. Bruce Rioch would be replaced by Arsène Wenger within a year, in no small part because of his broken relationship with Wright, but at the time there was a powerful sense that New Arsenal was emerging.



Dennis Bergkamp and David Platt, the England captain, had joined the club in the summer, a restoration of glamour to a club that was becoming a bit dowdy. Wright was as giddily excited as any fan at Bergkamp’s signing. On the day it was announced, he stopped at Clacket Lane motorway services to get some petrol and was inconvenienced by a BMW that was parked in the wrong place. Wright, irked at having to go around the BMW to get to the petrol pump, was about to share his thoughts in the time-honoured four-letter style when he realised who the driver was: Bergkamp. He started screaming like a kid who had just opened the greatest Christmas present in the history of all Christmas presents. It was an unlikely and eerily coincidental start to a great partnership on and off the pitch. They shared a room on away travels from the start; Wright was sufficiently in awe that, when he noticed that Bergkamp wore pyjamas and slippers, he instantly realised the limitations of vest-and-boxers chic and bought some pyjamas himself.



There was an early indication of how their partnership might work with this hugely accomplished goal at Everton in August, with a beautiful pass from Bergkamp and a masterful second touch from Wright. But it wasn’t an easy start for Bergkamp. He did not score his first goal until 23 September, his eighth game, and was lamentably ridiculed in the press, particularly when he failed to score in the League Cup at Hartlepool.



Wright scored against Hartlepool in both legs. Of course he did. The second came in the match before the trip to Elland Road - a beautiful chip that took his tally to nine in 10 for the season. It might have further emboldened him to try a chip or three at Leeds, if he’d needed any further emboldening.



At Elland Road, Arsenal looked pretty ominous. The Back Four was as strong as ever – Rioch’s greeting from all the backroom staff was along the lines of, “Nice to meet you Bruce, oh and don’t touch the defence,” – and they were looking much more dangerous going forward. Wright and Bergkamp were a real-life Championship Manager partnership, while Paul Merson seemed to be enjoying his football again after a spell in rehab. The team was far from complete – they had Martin Keown in midfield – but there was a palpable sense of improvement on a side that had finished 12th the previous season.



Leeds v Arsenal, Elland Road, Saturday 14 October 1995. Illustration: Guardian

Arsenal started the day in sixth, two points off Brian Little’s Aston Villa in second and six off Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle, who had set a blistering pace for the second season in a row but looked far better equipped to go the distance this time. Leeds were fifth, the same place they had finished in each of the previous two seasons. They were a bit of a motley crew, the sort only Howard Wilkinson could put together, but they had a solid base and, like Arsenal, seemed to have added significant attacking talent. They were still high on Tony Yeboah’s astonishing goals against Liverpool and Wimbledon earlier in the season and were closing in on the signing of Tomas Brolin, Parma’s brilliant young Swede. Nor had the more optimistic given up on the FA Youth Cup-winning team of 1993 – which thrashed Manchester United’s Class of 92 4-1 on aggregate in the final – making a proper breakthrough to the first team. Wilkinson had just been approached by the FA for the new role of technical director and his management skills and weary wit were admired throughout football.

There was a mood of cautious optimism everywhere. Liverpool and Manchester United were building teams around young talent – although at that stage most subscribed to Alan Hansen’s view about United’s ability to win anything with kids and nobody had heard of the Spice Girls, never mind Boys – while Newcastle were on an extended winter high. English football’s season of scandal, 1994-95, had been forgotten. The mood was not confined to football. Throughout the country there was a smug yet infectious mood of unpindownable hope about the future. Blur and Oasis’s battle of Britpop had occurred in August, and the stakes were to be raised with the release of Menswear’s debut album the following week. By the end of the season we would all be shouting lager, lager, lager, lager. Britannia was about to pronounce itself Cool.



There was one difference. As British culture became more inward-looking, football, for richer and poorer, was starting to open its mind. That is evident in the broadsheet descriptions of the first half at Elland Road, a cagey affair which would have been routinely described as boring a few years earlier. Not anymore. “The kind of sophisticated sparring more often to be seen on the Continent than in the Premiership,” said the Observer. “A first half of almost Continental cat and mouse,” opined the Guardian. “High on technical merit” considered the Independent.

Just before half-time, John Lukic – once of Arsenal, in his 400th game for Leeds – was given a piercing reminder of the inescapable cruelty of sport and life. He received a backpass and, not for the first time, made a mess of it, screwing his kick straight to Merson just inside the Leeds half. We’ll leave the description of what happened next to the Observer report, primarily because it contains one of the more unlikely pieces of elegant variation we will ever read. “The former coke fiend kept a clear head, controlled the ball deftly, and drove it low and right-footed past the despairing dive of Lukic.”



Bergkamp’s classy volleyed flick made it 2-0 early in the second half. All very nice, but nobody would really have remembered the match were it not for Wright’s goal with four minutes to go.

David Seaman’s goalkick bounced up towards Bergkamp, who tried to help it on for Wright. Instead it hit Wright in the face. That unexpected occurrence was Wright’s cue to start improvising, and a combination of instinct and intuition took over. When he was at his best, watching Wright was like listening to a breathless stream of consciousness punctuated with killer lines. The old cliché – if he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, how can the defender – was certainly applicable when the ball was at his feet.

On this occasion Wright was able to manufacture a shooting position and protect the ball from David Wetherall while simultaneously getting his bearings after enduring the stinging kiss of 16 ounces of vulcanised rubber on a cold Yorkshire day. If you pause the video a split-second before the shot, what Wright is about to do seems impossible. Wetherall is too close, and on the line of the planned chip; Lukic is only six yards out and the ball is stuck under Wright’s feet.

The obvious thing would have been to wallop it low towards the near post. So Wright did the complete opposite: he kissed it high towards the far post, with Wetherall’s momentum taking him just out of the line of the shot. Some might say that’s luck, though it’s hard to call it a fluke after the 10th time. Wright also hit the chip so early as to confound Lukic, who was taken out of the game before he even knew he was in it. One moment Wright was going nowhere; then, faster than you could say abracadabra, the ball was drifting gently, teasingly towards the net.

It was ingenious, lightning-witted stuff. There were only three seconds between the ball hitting Wright in the face and him making contact with the chip, and in that time he did not once take a proper look at the goal. The first time he looked up was to watch the ball drifting towards goal and run away in nonchalant celebration before it had reached the net.

As usual with Wright’s great goals, the imagination was only half the story. The execution was equally impressive. With the ball under his feet, and his head facing towards the corner flag, Wright contorted his body like a man speculatively sticking his bum out on the dancefloor during Let Me Be Your Fantasy, and then almost twisted his foot around the ball to lift it towards the far corner. Most players would have twisted their ankle ligaments and fallen over in a comic heap just as the ball dribbled miserably through to the keeper.

Wright loved scoring chips and lobs – partly because they were simply the most efficient way to score in that situation, and partly because they appealed to the showman in him. He practised them all the time in training, and developed beautiful technique and disguise. When Wright came into the consciousness of English football in 1989-90, great goalscorers (Gary Lineker, Ian Rush) and scorers of great goals (John Barnes, Mark Hughes) were almost mutually exclusive. Wright changed that and challenged the notion that goalscorers were only as good as the service they received. Although he got plenty of good support from players like Mark Bright, Alan Smith, Merson and Bergkamp, he also scored an abnormal number of individual goals.

The joy of scoring even the most mundane goal never faded, especially against Spurs, but chips and lobs were his treat, the solo project that gave him an extra buzz. Jimmy Anderson, English cricket’s most successful bowler, says he knows whether a ball is good the moment it leaves his hand. You suspect strikers are the same with chips. Wright will have loved that split-second when only he knew it was going in, and then he could watch as defenders, the crowd and particularly the goalkeeper joined him in realisation. That’s why Nayim’s goal in the 1995 Cup Winners’ Cup final would have hurt double. Not only did it deny Wright a happy ending after missing the final through suspension a year later; it was also the kind of goal he should have scored.

Nayim’s goal is an enduring reminder that to be lobbed or chipped is among the more humbling ways for a keeper to concede. Just look at Lukic’s face after the Leeds goal. That surely added to Wright’s enjoyment. He loved to, in his words, mug keepers off: mainly for fun, and partly to demonstrate his superiority. And if he could mug a defender off by twisting their blood beforehand, as he did with Erland Johnsen and Matt Jackson, so much the better. That masterpiece against Everton had the additional benefit of the foreplay of his two touches past Jackson, which created such anticipation as to prompt an unusual Mexican rise across the new North Bank.

Wright loved the unspoken battle with keepers, and his marker in the opposition defence. Sometimes it was a spoken battle: Des Walker – who himself used to sing “You’ll never beat Des Walker” in Gary Lineker’s ear during games - recalled Wright sledging him. “I just need one chance, Des, I just need one chance…”

Often he didn’t even need that. Goals like the one at Leeds could not really be considered a chance. As such they are a significant demonstration of superiority – individually, collectively, or both. That worked fine for Wright at Arsenal, a club which prides itself on its superior status. So, eventually, did Wright. For a time he had a justifiable chip on his shoulder about how many clubs had rejected him; he wrote his first letter before he was a teenager and did not join Crystal Palace until he was 21. The chips and lobs maybe helped remove that chip from his shoulder. Every time he scored one, the message: not only am I good enough to be here, I am better than you and can do things you will never be able to do.

At Elland Road, the manner of his goal added lustre to an already good performance from Arsenal. “Wright chips away at Arsenal’s reputation,” was the Times headline. “Bruce Rioch will have to be careful,” wrote the great Peter Ball. “If his team carries on like this, it will be in danger of burying the ‘boring Arsenal’ tag for all time.” The match, indeed, had been punctuated by ironic chants of “boring, boring Arsenal” from the away fans. “This match established Arsenal as 24-carat championship contenders” said the Independent. But it was fools’ gold. The jump from 12th in 1994-95 to potential champions was a bit too great, and Arsenal would ultimately finish in fifth, the position that had belonged to Leeds in the last two seasons.

Leeds started to lose their way: three days later they were walloped 5-3 at home by PSV Eindhoven and, although there was an unforgettable 3-1 win over Manchester United on Christmas Eve, they eventually finished 13th in the Premier League. Yeboah stopped walking on water and got injured, Brolin was nothing like the brochure suggested and the team lost 12 of their last 16 league games that season. They were also crushed by Aston Villa in the League Cup final. Wilkinson, who turned down the FA job, was sacked in September 1996 and became the FA’s Technical Director in 1997.

1995-96 was the season in which Leeds were famously accused of “cheating their manager” by Sir Alex Ferguson, the observation which pushed Keegan over the edge. Wright might have wanted to chin his managers. He was ostracised by the England coach Terry Venables and did not play for his country for two years from November 1994, which meant he missed Euro 96. (England, it should be noted, were spoilt for choice at the time.) And his relationship with Rioch was rapidly deteriorating. Given that it had been bad from the start, when Rioch called him a “champagne Charlie” in the dressing-room after a pre-season friendly at St Albans, that was a bit of an issue.

The pair had multiple rows, and Wright’s autobiography details rollockings for everything from being lazy to his earthy language to not eating his food in hotels on away trips. He was even – and you’ll like this – compared unfavourably to John McGinley, whose movement Rioch wanted Wright to copy. McGinley was an extremely good lower-league goalscorer, but he was nowhere near Wright’s class and such an observation was never likely to go down well.

The teething problems of Arsenal’s changing style also made things difficult for Wright. Bergkamp would eventually take him to higher places, but the new style of play necessitated a far bigger change than Wright first realised. It’s easy to remember, or rather forget, Rioch’s year in charge as an interlude between Graham and Arsene Wenger, yet at the time it was all-consuming for all concerned. “I look back on it now as the worst season of my career and one of the worst times of my life,” he said in his autobiography. In February 1996, he even asked for a transfer. “My love affair with Arsenal was over.”

That was hard enough, given how much Wright ‘got’ Arsenal, but to make things worse he was also starting to fall out of love with football. Anyone who has seen Wright as a pundit, let alone a player, will realise how unnerving and troubling that must have been to him. He was 32 years old. For all he knew, his career could have been winding down.

In the end Wright stayed and Rioch went. Under Wenger, Wright enjoyed two more years at the club, enough for he and Bergkamp to develop a legendary partnership on and off the field. They roomed together and became an unlikely comedy duo, particularly where Keown’s choice of attire was concerned.

There were so many good times for Wright at Arsenal – 185 of them – that it’s easy to forget about the bad. Yet at times it was a bittersweet experience. He missed the unexpected and criminally underrated victory over Parma in the 1994 Cup Winners’ Cup final because of suspension. The following season he scored in every round – except the final, which Arsenal then lost in the most numbing circumstances imaginable when Nayim scored from 50 yards.

Even when Wright finally won the league in 1997-98, his final season at Arsenal, injury meant he played only 18 minutes in the title-winning run of 10 straight wins. Then, instead of receiving a perfect farewell at Wembley, he was left an unused substitute when Arsenal completed the double by beating Newcastle in the FA Cup final.

There was earlier glory in the cup – both domestic trophies in 1992-93 and that win over Parma a year later, even if he missed the final – but for so much of Wright’s seven seasons he had to carry a modest side during the boring, boring transition between the title-winning sides of Graham and Wenger. Arsenal weren’t necessarily a one-man team, but they often felt like a one-man attack. The Arsenal fans often shared the chant-based observation that “Ian Wright FC are by far the greatest team that the world has ever seen”.

In September 1997, Wright surpassed Cliff Bastin as Arsenal’s greatest goalscorer when he scored his 179th goal for Arsenal against Bolton. The next highest scorer in that period was Merson with 51. Twice, in 1992-93 and 1994-95, Wright scored at least 30 goals when nobody else reached double figures.

Society plays a tedious game whereby it requires goalscorers say they are not selfish and only care about the team. It doesn’t bother me who scores so long as we win. What a load of transparent horse pucky! Everyone knows they are selfish and that they are right to be selfish, because it’s that mentality which allows them to score far more goals than they otherwise would.

That was especially true of Wright. For most of his career, his goalscoring capacity compared to the rest of the Arsenal team was such that it would have been selfish not to be selfish, and to hide from the burden of doing the hardest thing in football. Wright never hid. He put the ‘I’ in team: imagination, intuition, instinct, improvisation, individuality and ingenuity.

Plenty would say intelligence, too. The word means different things to different people. Those who use intelligence as others use their fists might regard ‘football intelligence’ as an oxymoron. Even within football, intelligence is generally associated with people who pass the ball or read the game. Goalscorers are rarely perceived in such a way. But whether it’s intelligence or hyper-awareness, they consistently demonstrate a brain-based aptitude that places them far above the average human. The movement and finishing of Gerd Müller, for example, was so knowing as to be downright eerie.

In 1983, the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner highlighted a series of sub-categories of intelligence, one of which was bodily-kinesthetic intelligence: “Characteristic of such an intelligence,” he said, “is the ability to use one’s body in highly differentiated and skilled ways, for expressive as well as goal directed purposes…”

Wright’s purposes were certainly goal directed. Gardner later defined intelligence as “the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural setting”. Wright’s problem was always how to get the ball from a, his foot, to b, the back of the net, but the details changed every time. He found bespoke solutions to bespoke problems. Both inside and outside the box.