sport news Ryan Sessegnon has gone from Tottenham's forgotten man to a star player under ... trends now
Ryan Sessegnon is only 22 but it feels like this has been a long time coming for him.
That comes of making his debut at 16 for Fulham, then being part of a great generation of England youth players, winning the Under 19 European Championship in 2017 and being touted as one of the best of the emerging talents from south London at that time, which included Jadon Sancho, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Tammy Abraham and Emile Smith Rowe.
It seems as though we’ve been on the cusp of something before, when Fulham were promoted in 2018-19, or when he moved to Spurs in 2019-20, before being somewhat underwhelmed. He was out of sight and out of mind on loan at Hoffenheim in 2020-21. But, quietly, he was rebuilding the confidence he had shown as a marauding youth player.
Despite being just 22, Ryan Sessegnon has been making a name for himself for five years
Born in Wandsworth but with parental roots in Benin, he is fluent in French, learned German in his time there, mixed in well with a multinational team and completed a decent season in the Bundesliga.
However, it has taken the arrival of Antonio Conte at Spurs to begin to see him flourish. It’s early days but his increasingly mature performances at the end of last season, when he started the last six games, saw him retained at left wing back last weekend. For good measure, he scored his first Tottenham goal in the 4-1 win over Southampton.
But there may be times when he isn’t wholly appreciative of the Italian’s methodology. Conte’s pre-seasons are notorious. This summer the team did an open training session in South Korea of 42 hard runs, the length of the pitch, which left Harry Kane vomiting and quitting and which broke Son Heung-min. Was pre-season all he had expected from Conte?
‘Worse!’ says Sessegnon. ‘I knew it was going to be tough but it was worse. Those 42 runs in Korea, the length of the pitch. The amount of running, it was crazy. I wasn’t being sick like a few of the players were. But I was on my knees.’
Sessegnon is now back at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium where he is keen to kick on
Sessegnon had already prepared with his own pre, pre-season, doing weights and fitness work at the training ground in early summer in order to be ready for the Conte impact. That he was favoured last week over Croatian Ivan Perisic, the manager’s specific signing for his position, bodes well.
‘I arrived in good shape. I did a lot of work before pre-season. It was more injury prevention, being able to cope with the demands of pre-season, which I knew was going to be tough, and getting a bit bigger in gym, building my legs, and stamina-wise doing a lot of runs.’
Being physically able to withstand
