Declan Rice waits for a bus to take him to West Ham’s Rush Green training ground when he is spotted by a fan. Rice is 19 years old and, with his car in for repairs at a local garage, to him the obvious way to get to training is via public transport. So he sticks his headphones in and his head down and leaves home.
It hadn’t properly dawned on Rice that one of the hottest young British players around, a Premier League regular in the middle of two countries vying for his services, might attract some attention on public transport. Then another fan spotted him at the bus stop. Rice was polite again – Rice is always polite, it’s something you hear time and again speaking to those who know him. Then he put his hood up.
Even so, when he stepped off the bus at the other end it came as a shock to the mob of exuberant autograph hunters often waiting outside the training ground gates.
But then Rice has always been different. Late to organised football, a late developer physically. Or so we’re told. Maybe it was perfectly-timed after all, given it all went towards Arsenal making him Britain’s most expensive footballer – his £105m fee (£5m of which is dependent on clauses being met) inching ahead of the £100m Manchester City paid for his England team-mate Jack Grealish in 2021.
Unlike almost all of his peers, Rice didn’t play for an amateur side before landing a place in Chelsea’s academy aged seven. Older brothers Connor and Jordan had taken that route and Rice’s dad, Sean, had watched parents screaming abuse from the touchlines and wanted to keep his youngest away from it.
So Rice played down the park, or in the garden, or joined his older brothers for five-a-side. He played anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes back at his parents’ home they look back at the photographs of Rice in a nappy, two years old, kicking the ball around the garden as the rain came down.
When Rice’s cousin, already at Chelsea’s academy, tried to convince the club to give him a trial, Chelsea initially said they only took players from amateur clubs. So first he had to play in a “pre-trial”, then a trial. And this kid wearing David Beckham’s Adidas Predator boots, who had never played for a team, impressed everyone.
Rice – by now 14 – sits in his room next to his dad, struggling to come to terms with being let go by Chelsea when his phone rings and it’s John Terry.
As a young centre-back, Rice, a Chelsea fan who had been a Stamford Bridge ball-boy, had based his game on the club’s defensive legend and captain: the way he could play the ball with both feet, his defensive acumen, his supreme leadership.
No one at Chelsea was sure of Rice’s best position and he spent a lot of time as a central midfielder, the names on the back of his shirts rotating between Terry and Joe Cole (with the occasional Neymar and Ronaldinho thrown in).
Terry was known for walking his dog and taking in Chelsea’s academy games, and liked what he saw in Rice, befriending the family. But not being the tallest, or strongest, or most technically-gifted, Chelsea’s youth coaches couldn’t quite see what Terry saw and he was told his time there was over.
As soon as Terry heard the news he was on the phone, telling Rice in a call that lasted almost an hour that he mustn’t give up, and to keep giving it everything. They remained close. Over the years, Rice would meet Terry for breakfasts that stretched into hours.
Rice had several offers to join new academies but West Ham’s stood out. The coaches there saw attributes that they thought in combination might be enough for him to make it. Even so, no one envisaged this gangly teenager going on to captain West Ham to silverware and becoming an England star.
“He wasn’t the best technical player,” Trevor Bumstead, a West Ham youth coach, told the Down the Tunnel podcast. “He was the type of player we were looking for in terms of a really great lad, gave every training session everything he had, and he was a really good decision-maker.
“That’s what we were looking for at West Ham at the time. Really good decision-makers with good technical ability. Declan wasn’t outstanding as a technician at the time, however he was good and we felt alongside his good character and decision-making he had some potential.”
How right they were. Not only did Rice, now a defender again, grow into a hugely popular young player liked by people across the club, he grew into a bigger body, into a more refined footballer, all the while his leadership skills based on Terry shining more brightly. No longer trailing behind his peers but accelerating in front of them. By 17 he captained the Under-23s to Premier League 2 promotion.
First-team manager Slaven Bilic handed him a Premier League debut and Rice, born in England but with Irish grandparents, was called up for the Republic of Ireland. It was Bilic who played him as a deep-lying midfielder during a pre-season training camp in Austria and Germany, then included him in his senior squad.
Rice found the zip and pace of the first team a big step up and though he was always committed – and never a drinker – it was then he started concentrating more on his diet, nutrition and fitness. He got on well and was helped to settle by Mark Noble, the club legend, Andy Carroll and Winston Reid.
While Rice was perhaps failing to realise how much attention his performances were gaining while he rode the bus to training, England manager Gareth Southgate and assistant Steve Holland were closely monitoring this young player at the base of West Ham’s midfield whose statistics suggested he was the best English player of his kind in a country lacking them.
It caused controversy when, after playing three friendlies for Ireland but no competitive games, enabling him to switch allegiance, Rice decided to consider where his international future lay. Ireland manager Martin O’Neill visited Rice’s home and Southgate – later described as “the most important cog in that wheel” by then FA technical director Dan Ashworth – made the pitch for England.
Without realising it at the time, Southgate might just have persuaded the next England captain to play for him.
