Rice Ruffles Real Madrid's Feathers
Declan Rice had not scored a free-kick goal in 338 games of club football until Tuesday night...
Welcome back to The Overlap Newsletter! On Wednesday night, Arsenal stunned Real Madrid with an incredible second half performance for a famous 3-0 win at The Emirates. Declan Rice was the man to take control of the game with two incredible free kicks that put The Gunners two goals in front by the 70th minute. Rice had never scored a direct free-kick before in his professional career and is now the first player to score two direct free-kicks in a Champions League knockout match. Mikel Merino added a third, leading to Real Madrid’s joint-heaviest defeat in the first leg of a UEFA Champions League knockout stage tie, along with a 4-1 loss at Borussia Dortmund in the semi-finals in 2012-13. The flair and sharpness in play expected of Ancelotti's team was missing and they will now need to produce a moment of magic in the return leg at the Bernabeu next week to secure what will be an unlikely win. Madrid have produced some moments of magic in this competition, but the question is - will they be able to turn things around or are Arsenal on their way to booking a spot in the Champions League Semi-Final?
Quiz Question…
Graham Potter can become the first head coach to avoid defeat in four successive away matches at Anfield since which manager between 2016 and 2020?
Answer to follow at the end of the Newsletter…
Stick To Football Behind The Scenes:
HOW UGLY DUCKLING DECLAN LEFT JUDE AND KYLIAN IN HIS WAKE
By Rob Draper, co-host It Was What It Was
Everyone loves a bit of back projection when talking about their favourite footballer. You know the sort of thing. “We always knew he would make it. He was destined for the top. I could tell at the age of six that he would be a Ballon d’Or contender.”
So you had to wonder how Terry Westley was feeling on Tuesday night when the world took note that Declan Rice was stepping up to be one of the great midfielders of this Champions League campaign.
Westley, 65, is one of those sage, experienced figures who has watched more football than almost anyone alive. He just ponders the game and makes a judgement. Invariably he's right. And it was ten years ago in 2015 when he was asked to make a call on a scrawny, undeveloped midfielder in the West Ham youth team. The 16-year-old was so far from the finished article that the club was considering letting him go. After all, he had been discarded by Chelsea at 14 and the next two years at West Ham hadn’t set the world alight. Now was crunch time. Would the club offer him a scholarship deal?
Westley was Head of Academy and it was his decision, though some coaches had given up on the midfielder. “It’s a crazy story,” Rice told Gary Neville on an edition of The Overlap in 2022:
“They were going to release me. It was a 50-50 decision. Half the coaches wanted to keep me on. Half were saying: ‘We’re not too sure.’”
It came down to the last game of the season against Fulham, though Westley was already pretty sure. “I was convinced he was a late developer, that there was lots to come and he had an outstanding mentality. In the end, I just said: ‘I’m Head of Academy at West Ham and I’m taking the decision to keep him.’ I pulled him to one side after that Fulham game and said: 'Go home, tell your parents you’ve got a two-year scholarship.’”
Even then, it wasn’t onwards and upwards, Slaven Bilic was West Ham manager as that teenager attempted to make his mark on the first team, by now a centre-half. “We thought he might one day turn out to be West Ham captain as a centre-back, a John Terry type, because he was very reliable and had that determination,” said Bilic. “But let’s not bull****. Did he look like he would go on to be one of the best midfielders in the Premier League? No, I can’t lie.”
At Chelsea he was overlooked because he was part of a golden generation that included Mason Mount, Reece James and Trevoh Chalobah, Marc Guehi, Conor Gallagher, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Tariq Lamptey. Brilliantly though most of those have done, none is the centre of global attention now like Rice.
Tony Carr, Westley’s predecessor at West Ham, remembers the day when he was tipped off about the 14-year-old being let go by Chelsea. “Our head of scouting Dave Hunt told me Chelsea were letting two players go that we should have a look at. I didn’t know the names but when they turned up, I recognised them from academy games. What I liked about Declan was that he always looked you in the eye. If the coaches said something, he’d hold his gaze and show he understood.”
What happened on Tuesday night was, to be fair, a surprise to everyone because the David Beckham free kick routine wasn’t previously a part of the Rice repertoire. And yet, for most of us who have watched Rice develop in recent years, the fact that he could boss a Real Marid midfield of Luka Modric, Jude Bellingham and Eduardo Camavinga wasn’t a complete surprise. He already looked one of the world’s best midfielders when he joined Arsenal in 2022, The confidence Mikel Arteta has subsequently given him in an advanced No.8 position means his potential to dominate games is greatly enhanced. There is something almost Steven Gerrard like about his ability to be seemingly everything, everywhere, all at once.
To his credit, even Rice looked a little surprised at the brilliance of the free kicks, which is very much in keeping with his humble backstory. He is very much the superstar without the unnecessary swagger. With Real Madrid, you can never be 100 percent sure they’re dead and buried until you have properly driven a stake through their heart. So it still feels there is at least a degree of tension going into the Bernabéu next week.
Yet if Rice can follow up on Tuesday’s performance, if Arsenal can control Real Madrid like they did at The Emirates, then we can start to say that this is the best Arsenal side in European football since 2006, the year they lost the Champions League final in Paris to Barcelona. (Arguably the year they should have won the trophy was the Invincible 2004 year, when they really did look the best team in Europe yet were knocked out by Chelsea in the quarter-finals).
Rice offers all of us, whatever field we’re in, a degree of hope. It is the ugly duckling lesson. It’s not that everyone rejected gets to be a beautiful swan.But it is true that early judgement calls are extremely subjective. That often there is far more potential in anyone than a binary rejection suggests. Keeping on keeping on is sometimes the best plan of all, however difficult it looks. Declan Rice did just that and now the whole world knows his name.
Quiz Answer:
Sam Allardyce