WHZ View: Declan Rice is a leader for West Ham and England
As West Ham fans, we’ve been fortunate enough to watch Declan Rice develop into a world-class footballer first hand over the past few seasons.
It’s been a rapid rise to the top. Rice made his debut in the penultimate game of the 2016/17 season. Since then, he’s gone on to play in 128 of the 143 Premier League games the Hammers have had.
Having started every game this season, and every game last season, it has been no surprise to see Rice wear the captain’s armband as Mark Noble takes a back seat. In doing so, the 22-year-old has led West Ham to new heights.
With just nine matches to go, we are still in with a shot of qualifying for the Champions League. It would be the first time in our history should we do so. A large factor has been the leadership of Rice.
It’s not just for his club that the youngster has taken a senior role, though. Whilst representing England, Rice has grown in confidence every game. Against Albania, he was voted the man of the match and is clearly high in Gareth Southgate’s estimations.
This season in particular we’ve seen him do a lot of post-match interviews with the pundits from Sky and BT Sports. But now, Southgate has recruited Rice to perform the media duties for England.
In a live stream by the England Twitter account yesterday [18.00 pm], Rice demanded more of his team for their upcoming match with Poland.
“Where we’d been in such dominance of the game we sat back and let them (Albania) have a little bit more of the ball,” said Rice.
“There are a couple of chances where we were on the counter-attack and we could have killed it off with a better final pass, and there are other things on the pitch we could have done a bit better.
“You feel that you know, as a player. Where you’ve dominated the whole game and they start to have a bit of the ball it becomes frustrating. So yeah, areas to improve on and I think it’s always good to improve on different parts of the game.”
Rice has led through his performances for much of his time at West Ham. This year, David Moyes has given him the armband to lead vocally. He appears to be doing this now with the national side, asking for more of his teammates despite the 2-0 win last week.
It speaks volumes about the confidence and maturity he possesses in his own ability. We’re running out of ways to describe just how excellent he is. It’s very easy to forget sometimes how young he is given the amount of first-team football he’s played at the top.
Let’s just hope that we can finish high enough this season to convince him to stay with us for at least one more year. That would be nice.
In other West Ham news, the Hammers ‘don’t have the minerals’ to finish in the top four, according to this talkSPORT host.