I SAW a bunch of Arsenal fans on the train last Saturday evening, most of them, grown men, dressed in those nursery-colour replica shirts with the name of an underachieving foreign player on the back and an injunction to travel with a low-cost Middle Eastern airline on the front. They were huddled together on First Great Western, heading back to those famous north London redoubts of Didcot, Swindon, Bristol and Swansea. They seemed aggrieved, the consequence perhaps of having been held to a goalless draw at home by lowly (ie lying in eighth place) West Ham United and maybe also the ignominy of themselves being in fifth place in the league. But there was hope, there was hope. They were excited by the prospect of something called Arse Shaving. It would be Arse Shaving that propelled them back to their rightful place in the Premier League (ie fourth). They could not wait. They were beside themselves. What do we want? Arse Shaving! When do we want it? NOW!

If ever there was a player made in Arsenal’s image, it is surely Andrey Sergeyevich Arshavin and it is perhaps for this reason that those fans on the train may end up disappointed. You would not doubt his skill, which can be sublime - he is also, in the Arsenal mould, a handsome little moppet, oddly articulate for a footballer and hell, he even has a diploma in fashion design. If any club in the league were going to bolster their forward line by buying Karl Lagerfeld, it’s surely Arsenal. There are other qualities that suit the club, too. He is not quite a striker, and Arsenal like people who are not quite strikers; his goals-per-game ratio at Zenit St Petersburg is about one in four and, the Russkie league being a few notches below our own gilded Premier League, you might expect that ratio to sag a little at the Emirates. He is not quite a midfielder, either; there is not much grit to the chap. Patrick Vieira he certainly ain’t, although he has some of Vieira’s petulance. You might argue, looking at Arsenal, that they need four things: a goalkeeper, a centre-half, a tough midfielder with leadership qualities and an out-and-out goalscorer. Arshavin exists in a lovely place where these realities have no meaning. Arsène Wenger was therefore bound to adore him. If you told the Arsenal manager that they could do worse than buy, say, Tim Cahill for half the price of Arshavin, he would look away in distaste, as if you had just urinated in his briefcase.

Arshavin is also, like Arsenal, a thing of caprice, with a confidence as fragile and tenuous as the surface tension of water. He emerged from obscurity during Euro 2008 and his record there gives you a clue as to the man and what he might provide for his new club. He was suspended for the first two games - a fairly frequent occurrence for Andrey, you have to say. Then, against the mediocre Swedes and the magnificent, suicidal Dutch he was unplayable, quite astonishing, mercurial, clever and incisive. These were the two best individual performances of the competition, by some margin, and his inclusion in the team of the tournament was probably deserved. But then, once again, in the subsequent game against Spain, he became all distrait and forlorn, utterly anonymous - arguably one of Russia’s least effective performers. So that’s five games: two sat out through suspension, two quite brilliant, one totally useless. He was not much better, incidentally, in the qualifying games against Steve McClaren’s stuttering and witless England. I wonder how he’ll be against Bolton and Blackburn. Or, indeed, Manchester United. On the available evidence, Arshavin is easily at his best when playing a counter-attacking game, when he has pace and surprise on his side. But he can easily be cowed by wars of attrition.

You might say that it is foolish to judge a player upon so slender a number of performances. I would agree with you. But it seems to be the criteria upon which Arshavin has been judged by the Premier League managers - otherwise Tottenham Hotspur (who offered fifteen million quid for the bloke at the start of the season) and Arsenal would have whacked in those bids long before Euro 2008 took place. But they did not. I don’t doubt that Wenger and Juande Ramos cast a brief glance over Arshavin’s club career before they started waving the dosh about, but it strikes me that the real basis for the bids were those two games mentioned above. How else do you explain the timing of them? Coincidence? Players are often bought because they turn in a couple of good performances in high-profile competitions, of course. Central defenders from the Gilbert and Ellis Islands who succeed in outwitting Peter Crouch for 90 minutes are rewarded with a Premier League contract as a consequence. It rarely works, though, even if it does cheer up the fans for a while.

It may be that Arsène wished to transform Arshavin, in much the same way that he transformed Thierry Henry and made him, for quite a while, the most exciting and dangerous forward in Europe. Certainly he has the raw talent at his disposal. But whether the Russkie is what Arsenal really need is another question entirely, one that Wenger, a likeable purist, seems unwilling to answer.