Goodbye, Thierry.

For all the relentless posturing and feigned warm-up that Thierry Henry carried out leading up to his late entry into the Uruguay-France first round match this afternoon, the end result was visibly nothing. He lightly trapped the ball in the box, presumably for one of his teammates to handle. He let a decidedly high long-ball fly over his head, too high perhaps for a fresh-legged substitute to bother jumping or reaching for. He did, at one point, trap, handle and shoot the ball, and then abruptly stopped and turned to the referee asking for a penalty kick to be awarded for an unintentional and inevitable, all irony aside, handball on the part of his Uruguayan caretaker. The icing on his proverbial suck-cake was the final play of the game, a free kick he handled from just outside the box. A carefully planned approach with appropriate gestures of tension and confidence appeared, from the authors perspective, to result in a casual chip, easily removed from the field of play, the final punctuation in what should very well be Thierry Henry's last nod on the world stage. Perhaps France can bring in another mildly potent striker in his place and award him the same status of Supreme Inspirer as England's David Beckham. We've seen Henry's cool, collected footballer style transform into a kind of spectacular nonchalance in the past few years, a metamorphosis that clearly jives with his upcoming immigration into the MLS to play for the New York Red Bulls with full honorary celebrity status, a gesture awkwardly perfected by predecessor and partner-in-impotence Beckham. We need not see any more of it.