Things to do in Barcelona on a Monday night. Dinner at the swanky Arts hotel? A stroll on the sand in Castelldefels? A lively soiree at Ronaldinho’s place? A concert at the ornate Palace of Music? Thierry Henry preferred a night in, watching the Palace. That’s Crystal Palace. Away at Stoke, English Championship, beamed to the Mediterranean via satellite. And he had utterly enjoyed it.

Henry has always been an avid watcher of football - a trait not shared by all in his profession - and to listen to his enthusiasm for it is to remember that while this is perhaps the footballer most widely admired by English fans in the 15-year history of the Premier League, the relationship goes both ways. Henry is a fan, a fervent fan, of English football. Being nine months and 2,000 miles away from it has barely eroded the ardour. On Sunday, he watched Middlesbrough-Manchester United and later he played against Getafe in La Liga. Monday, he took in Stoke-Palace; Tuesday found him glued - “watching like a lunatic” - to Liverpool-Arsenal and on Wednesday he would be involved in securing Barcelona’s progress to the last four of the Champions League, where they will meet United. A fair guess would have Henry tuned into something from the Premier League yesterday afternoon as Barça rested him - he had picked up a minor injury - for their evening fixture at Recreativo de Huelva. A suspicion might be also be entertained that at times the recent watching may have been more fun than the participation.

Henry, corralled on the left flank of Camp Nou, has not always found Barcelona an easy new workplace. Seven days ago, he experienced his first full pañolada, not something you get at Ashburton Grove or, for that matter, watching Stoke on the telly. The pañolada has its origins in bullfighting, the mass waving of white handkerchiefs a vivid and noisy expression of censure for the matador. In football grounds, the hankies deride the team, the coach or the president. At the end of Barça’s 0-0 home draw with Getafe, the jeers would be directed at all three. Even a 2-0 aggregate victory over Schalke could not prevent a mini- pañolada in midweek.

That, it seems to Henry, epitomised an important difference between the culture he had grown to love in England and one that has yet to capture his heart in Barcelona. “That’s the way it is here. If you play a ball forward that you should have played backwards, they let you know,” he says. “Even when you’re winning, if you play the wrong ball, they’ll let you know. In England, if you play the wrong pass the crowd will get behind you even more. It’s different.”

Those paid to watch have not been forgiving of Henry’s lapses either. El Mundo Deportivo, the Barça-centric tabloid, reported the Frenchman’s role in the 1-0 win over Schalke thus: “Until the 49th minute, if you had been told Henry was actually in London, you would have believed them. At that point, he had a clear chance but sent it over. After that, complaints, protests, but not much else.”

Henry’s Spanish has developed well enough to have read such words should he choose to, or to note that another daily, El Pais, talked the same morning of his having reached a “sell-by date”. Sport, a tabloid that wears blinkers only in Barça colours, gave his performance what has become their customary four out of 10.

Henry is perfectly capable of his own mea culpas, though he lets it be known he believes his winger’s role in the Barça team imposes restrictions. “The performance against Schalke we won’t talk too long about, but somehow we are in the semi-final of the Champions League and there are a lot of teams who would like to be in that position,” he says. And what of his position? Henry acknowledged some fatigue about his game but the reasons are no longer down to the lengthy recovery from injury that had disrupted his 2007 but because, he says, “I have never run so much in my whole career”. This is largely because of an obligation to patrol most of the left flank, his designated spot in Frank Rijkaard’s team, one that used to be occupied by Ronaldinho.

Gary Lineker would recognise the condition. He had been a brilliant centre-forward in English football who went to Barcelona in the 1980s and found himself recast, unhappily, to the wing. Henry has spoken as plainly as he can without being accused of dissent about his frustration with the role and to the frequent question posed by Barcelonistas - Why is he not the Thierry Henry of Arsenal? - his answers become quite specific: “Instead of setting off from behind the defenders, 30 metres from goal, I’m setting off 60 metres from goal.” How is he not the Henry of Arsenal? Here are the statistics: In the Premier League he scored 174 goals from 235 starts. For Barça he has seven league goals from 22 starts, in the Champions League three goals in eight games and by the end of that eighth, against Schalke, he conspicuously lacked his trademark acceleration in one duel. He said afterwards he felt “cooked”.

When, for one or two cameos, Henry of Barcelona has looked like the Henry of Arsenal - like the lovely arching, curling lob with which he scored at Celtic in the Champions League - he has quickly urged people not to expect him to replicate what he did in London in Catalonia, where the competition for leading roles up front, even without the discarded Ronaldinho, comes from Samuel Eto’o, Lionel Messi and the favoured teenager Bojan Krkic. Henry has been provider for all of them on occasion, his service from the flank having set up 10 further Barcelona goals, but he still gives off the strong impression of a centre-forward suddenly rehoused.

At a club uncomfortable with the realisation that it is not what it was two years ago, Henry does not pretend all is hunky-dory. The United tie was bound to whet his appetite, though. “He’ll be pleased to be going back to England for a match like that,” suggests his Barça colleague and compatriot Lilian Thuram.

Might he rather be going anywhere else in England to play for a place in the Champions League final? “It’s normal that people would pick them as favourites,” says Henry, “because of the way they are playing at the moment and the way we are playing.” His jousts with United had been many, most of them fierce, some of them, at the time when Arsenal-United carried real grudge, raw and angry, but for Henry always with a reservoir of mutual appreciation.

“When I was at Arsenal people were kind enough to praise the way we played but I always thought United were beautiful to watch, too. I don’t know if you can say they have developed since because they are doing what they’ve done for a long time. Okay, so Chelsea won two titles in two years but United have always been in there fighting. They’ve always got great players who are good on the ball and hard workers - the right mix - and some new ones: I knew about Carlos Tevez even when he was in Argentina, the same with Anderson, because we played against Porto last year. I thought he was a decent player, so for me there is no great surprise that they have done well.”

The novelty, the sign of new times, lies in the fact that young South Americans such as Tevez and Anderson are going to England, not to Spain or Italy. Had Henry a sense that the rest of Europe envied the Premier League its economic clout? “Three English teams are in the last four of the Champions League again,” he says. “All the time when I was in England I always said it was the best league in the world and I’m certainly not going to change my mind now. It’s not just the money. It’s pleasant to watch. I watched the three Arsenal-Liverpool games and the pace was just ridiculous. That was English football at its best. And all around the world people will have been talking about it. Certainly everyone here was talking about it.” Mournful about the outcome for Arsenal, Henry was still keen to talk about it further: “When Theo [Walcott] went on that run it was out of this world. ‘Come on, guys!’ I was saying. Six minutes to go, then the penalty. I was so sad because they played all season just amazingly and it came down to that. Just six minutes to go. I was really down for them, a young group of lads didn’t deserve this after the way they’ve played.”

Naturally, Henry will be watching - “like a lunatic” - when Arsenal take on United today. That fixture doubles up as homework. United come to Camp Nou a week on Wednesday, back to the setting of their last, and most dramatic, European Cup final. “United are on a high, but Middlesbrough have shown you can score goals against them,” says Henry. “And don’t forget we’ll have Leo Messi and Deco back and for sure they’ll make a difference. Deco has won the Champions League twice now with Porto and Barça, so he really knows what it takes to win this competition. He’s a winner and when you have guys like that in your squad it has to be a help.”

As for Messi, absent since early March, current comparisons hardly come more flattering than the one Henry offers: “Messi can do anything. Taking him out of our side is like taking Cristiano Ronaldo out of Man United. When he’s on song, my God! Having Leo and Deco back could be a big factor and we can benefit from the freshness they bring. Maybe they run a bit more than the rest and that freshens up a team.”

Spoken by a man eager to turn a fresh page.

Henry’s year in Spain

June 22, 2007 Barcelona announce the signing of Thierry Henry for around £16m, bringing to an end an eight-year, record-breaking Arsenal career, in which he had become the London club’s greatest goalscorer and won two Premier League titles. ‘It wasn’t that the club wanted to sell me,’ says Henry. ‘It’s me saying I am ready to go.’ Henry adds that he relishes fighting for a first-team place alongside Ronaldinho, Eto’o, Messi and Co

July 26 Henry makes the ideal start, scoring on his Barça debut, a friendly against Dundee United

August 26 Makes his bow in La Liga, hitting the post as Barcelona’s drab goalless draw in Santander offers an ominous portent of an often frustating season ahead

Sept 30 Scores a hat-trick against struggling Levante, but in 24 further league appearances Henry manages only four more goals as his football is inhibited by injury problems dating back to the previous season and also by his isolated role on the left wing

Oct 17 Henry enjoys one of his season’s high spots while playing for his country, overtaking Michel Platini as France’s all-time top goalscorer, with his 42nd and 43rd goals for Les Bleus

Dec 23 Barcelona lose at home in the ‘Gran Clasico’ to Real Madrid and slip behind in the title race. Barça fans grow increasingly impatitent as Madrid top the table for the vast majority of the Liga season

Feb 20, 2008 Henry scores a wonder goal at Celtic Park, one of three from his eight Champions League games for Barcelona. It evokes memories of some of his greatest strikes for Arsenal, but Henry insists Barcelona fans ‘should not look for the Henry of Arsenal, but the Henry of Barça’. He later voices his discomfort at being asked to play in a wide position, unlike his role with Arsenal and France

March 12 Henry acknowledges that the fallout from his September divorce from his model wife Claire Merry with whom he has a daughter, two-year-old Tea, has affected him. ‘I’m not happy because a father that only sees his daughter five times in the last eight months cannot be,’ Henry tells a press conference at Barcelona

April 9 Barcelona and Henry are offered the chance to end a disappointing season on a high when they beat Schalke 04 to qualify for the semi-finals of the Champions League. They now face Manchester United in the last four. ‘It’s normal that people should think United are favourites,’ admits Henry at the prospect of playing the Premier League champions for a place in the Moscow final