Welcome back, then, Arsenal. For a long time you were brilliant. Then you were just quite good. Then, suddenly, you were crap. Now you are quite good again. Perhaps you will soon go back to being crap. It is, let's face it, quite hard to keep up.

Either way Arsène Wenger's rejuvenated north London academy of the performing backheel will face Aston Villa at the Emirates on Saturday a team in an annoyingly unclassifiable state of turnaround: buoyantly crisis-ridden, resurgently slumped, triumphantly in fatal decline. For now, though, the mediocrity nouveau has stalled. This no longer looks like New Crap Arsenal. Albeit it also doesn't look like Old Good Arsenal either. Instead, out of enforced limitations Wenger appears to have come up with something a little different. Cheap Simple Arsenal: an Arsenal constructed out of locally sourced balsa wood, an Arsenal you can copy at home. Best of all, the new regime appears to centre quite heavily on dear old Theo Walcott, one of the more intriguing characters in English football; a player who was once so famously the future and who may now, six years later, be the future all over again.

Theo! Few England players in recent times have invoked such lapel-throttling frustrations. What acceleration! What speed! What … is he up to now? It is heartening to see such renewed purpose in Arsenal's late-blooming prodigy, the fastest slowest learner in the world, and a player who even in his most convincingly footballer-ish moments – when he doesn't seem too nice or too airily devoid of gimlet-eyed athletic cunning – still has an air of earnest otherworldliness, of having jetted in eagerly from some related realm of sporting endeavour, a job-swap wide receiver or a hurdler with a cribsheet.

Until recently Walcott still seemed indelibly marked by his premature elevation to England's 2006 World Cup squad, where he spent a month wandering the streets of Baden-Baden in flip-flops, a tourist, a mascot, a competition winner. This early Walcott still had the air of a foundling footballer, some scampering rural wood sprite spotted haring out of the treeline through the morning mist, ears pinned back, glossy-eyed, downy chest heaving.

Most commonly Walcott has been dismissed as having "no end product", often with such venom it is as though he has overtly rejected the chance to have an end product, or boisterously talked up his end product only to go rattling out of town at dawn at the reins of his snake oil wagon. Otherwise the objection is that Walcott is "just a sprinter". Make no mistake, though, his speed is born of rare physical gifts. At least one former Great Britain sprinter is given to eulogising over Walcott's effortless stride, the purity of the personal mechanics that keep him still thrumming along at top speed to the final whistle. It is a thoroughbred speed as opposed to, say, the rather frantic Aaron Lennon who runs like he's just burnt both his hands on a toasted pitta bread and is haring out into the back garden to plunge them into a pile of snow.

It seems clear now that Walcott is unlikely to develop into a Berkshire Luís Figo. But Arsenal have devised a tactical rejig that spotlights his gifts rather than his failings. The preoccupation with diffuse possession has been ceded slightly in favour of a toe-to-toe pressing game, based no doubt on the flash-mob roughings-up routinely handed out – on those rare occasions they find themselves no longer in possession of the ball – by the pigeon-chested skill-gnomes of Barcelona.

At the same time Arsenal have become selectively direct, their attack dwindled to a surgical point. Essentially they have a man who runs fast and a man who kicks the ball into the goal (you know: Him), while everyone else is charged with giving the ball either to the goal-running man or the goal-kicking man. It is a peculiarly English way of playing, a refined version of direct football whereby, rather than hoofing hopefully for the corners Arsenal instead instruct Walcott to run hopefully for the corner. Under this system the speeding Walcott is basically a punt downfield made flesh, a living breathing percentage-launch and chief instrument of, not so much kick and rush football, as rush and rush football.

In his trimmed-down role there is less need for an end product. Walcott must simply spread high-speed alarm, master the cutback not the cross, and surprise everybody by scoring occasionally (eight so far this season). He has been aided in this by the uselessness of many Premier League defences, but also by the emergence of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, a fearless, barrel-chested youth who can dribble and prompt with genuine acuity and who has in the process freed Walcott up to gallop with narrow-focus intensity like a jack russell chasing a wasp along a crowded beach.

There is something else, too. It may be contrary to the historical practices of Wengerism, but Arsenal now have four young players – Walcott, Oxlade‑Chamberlain, Jack Wilshere and Kieran Gibbs – hovering close to the England team. Unusual England players, too, in that they don't look frightened or embarrassing, or in the way of many young English players as though they've been cobbled together from spam and leather offcuts; or, like Andy Carroll, splinted into a clanking humanoid effigy from old deckchair ends and shards of corrugated iron.

There has been a peculiar ambient venom directed towards Wenger throughout the recent mixed results, a sense of having been somehow cheated by this frowsty financial puritan in his haggard nylon floor-length gown. A downturn into trophyless stability has been greeted not with a shrug but with scowling disbelief, the flaming torches gathered on the front lawn, scouring the atrium for a glimpse of that shadowy figure swishing his quilted puffa cape at the window, balance sheet clutched in one trembling hand.

Perhaps out of the constraints of squad-depletion and informed personal stinginess Wenger might even have come up with a blueprint for something just as effective as the sideways-shuffling exoticisms of old. A style we might call guerrilla-football. Sprint-kick. Run-foot. Or even perhaps Theoball: a way of playing that knows its technical limits and instead simply plays to its hand of refined athletic strengths, leaving behind the chintz of defeated expectation and just letting itself run.