sport news Declan Rice could have been cut by West Ham at age 16 due to his 'weird' ... trends now
They still remember the debate at West Ham and Declan Rice still recalls the day his future was resolved. The payback this summer for taking the right decision in 2015 could be £100million.
More importantly, there may also be another West Ham skipper to add to the photos of Bobby Moore and Billy Bonds lifting trophies.
The latter part of that equation depends on West Ham overcoming Fiorentina in Prague in the Europa Conference League final.
Whatever happens, it will be Rice’s last game for the club that rescued him from Chelsea rejection at the age of 14 before he likely moves on to Arsenal, though Bayern Munich and Manchester United have also shown interest.
So now is the time to trot out those familiar stories about how he was always destined to be a West Ham great. Except they are just not true.
Declan Rice could leave West Ham this summer, but before he makes his decision, he'll play one more game for the club next week in the Europa Conference League final
Slaven Bilic (pictured), who gave Rice his debut for the club, said he didn't expect him to turn out this good
The West Ham captain has excelled over the past few seasons to becoming one of the best and highly-rated midfielders in the country
Slaven Bilic, the man who gave him his West Ham debut, is characteristically blunt.
‘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.’
It was not just Chelsea who doubted him, cutting him from their youth programme at 14. Even at 16 years old, he did not especially look the part of future pro. And some at West Ham were ready to let him go. Like Harry Kane, another potential £100m player this summer, he was an ‘ugly duckling’.
‘It’s a crazy story, Rice said recently. ‘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”. We played a game against Fulham, I played for the Under 18s that day at centre-half and Terry Westley told me after that he would give me my scholarship.’
Even then Rice was only offered a two-year scholarship. The better players had a three-year pro contract thrown in. Rice did not merit that but Westley, now technical advisor to Japan’s J-League, remembers the internal debate at the club over whether to keep Rice or not.
‘In the end I just said: “I’m Head of Academy at West Ham and I’m taking the decision to keep him”. I was convinced he was a late developer, that there was lots to come and he had an outstanding mentality. Those were reasons I made the case for 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”.
The reaction was typical of him. There was no big-time about him just sheer delight. And he had earned that great feeling to be able to get into the car and tell his parents he was staying on.’
Having spent most of his career with West Ham, and could have gone elsewhere had it not been for Terry Westley, West Ham's former Academy manager
Rice was recently pictured at Chadwell heath with Terry Westly (first-left), Sir Trevor Brooking (second left) and Mark Noble (fourth left)
Rice’s life had never been the gilded path of a prodigy. Tony Carr, Westley’s predecessor at West Ham, remembers the day when he was tipped off about the 14-year-old midfielder rejected 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.’
Rice may have seemed composed and confident. Inside though, he was just another insecure 14-year-old when the Chelsea rejection came. ‘I felt like that was it,’ he told Gary Neville on The Overlap.
‘The embarrassment of it was a big one. How do you tell your friends that you’ve been released by Chelsea? There was shock, upset. Chelsea was all I knew. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? But that night I trained with Fulham on the Wednesday and on Thursday I was at West Ham.’
Westley said: ‘To be fair to Chelsea, they had so many good players in that group. Rice’s immediate contemporaries were his closest friend Mason Mount, Reece James and Trevoh Chalobah. Marc Guehi, Conor Gallagher, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Tariq Lamptey were a year younger.
‘It was an age group in which they were blessed,’ says Westley. ‘I
