When Danny Rose arrived at Tottenham Hotspur in the summer of 2007, a 17-year-old Yorkshire lad making a new life for himself down south, the other new boy in the squad was also a left-footed teenager with a turn of pace who nurtured big ambitions for the future.
Nine years on and Rose likes to joke that Gareth Bale, his old Spurs team-mate, has moved forward from left-back to become one of the best attacking players in Europe, while Rose himself has moved in the other direction, from a tricky winger to left-back. On Thursday in Lensthese two former team-mates will face each other at a European Championship – Bale as Wales’s great hope and Rose at last a first-choice England player after years of waiting for his debut.
It has been a longer road for Rose since he left Leeds United’s academy to go to Spurs, but he eventually won his first cap in March against Germany, having toyed with the idea of playing for Jamaica, for whom he qualifies through both sets of grandparents. A pint-sized package of strength, pace and determination, he was voted into the Professional Footballers’ Association Premier League team of the year by his fellow pros and has flourished under Mauricio Pochettino.
At England’s media centre in Chantilly, he recalled his last meeting with Bale in a pre-season friendly, the only time he has been on the opposite side to his old team-mate other than all those days on the training pitches at Spurs. “It is no coincidence [that Bale has had such a remarkable career],” Rose says. “He lives his life off the field as a true professional.
“He doesn’t drink and rarely goes out. He eats very well and he’s probably the only guy I’ve seen that is a lot quicker than Kyle Walker. I didn’t think that was possible. I know he has had quite a few injuries, and that may be his body getting used to the transition – first Premier League football, and now he’s had to adjust to Spanish football.
“I don’t think there is a surprise that he has hit the heights he has considering how he lives his life on and off the field.”
When you speak to Bale’s former team-mates you realise quickly that there is no great unexplored backstory to the Welshman – he really is just about football, and preparing to play football. Rose recalls the days they spent living in the footballer’s Essex haven, Repton Park, with Bale always closer to the first team at Spurs and “a pretty reserved bloke who keeps himself to himself”.
“It’s been great to see what he has achieved over the last five years,” Rose said. “I am over the moon for him considering he got a bit of stick in his first season at Real. He has made a great transformation in terms of changing position. He joined Spurs predominantly as a left-back, and then he moved into midfield, and now he’s one of the most dangerous attacking midfielders in the world.
“We played Real in pre-season last summer and I got to catch up with him, and it was nice to see how happy he was and how he is relishing his football over there.”
Rose was clear that the reason Roy Hodgson wanted to play Portugal last week was to replicate the Bale effect by trying to deal with Cristiano Ronaldo – not that Ronaldo himself would see it that way. In the end Ronaldo did not play the game and Rose says that England cannot become obsessed with Wales’s best player.
“But of course Gareth is very dangerous, and I’m sure the manager and his team will put together a game plan to go out and win against Wales.”
It took Rose longer to make it, and four loan spells away from Spurs before he accepted that his best position was left-back. It was his 2012-2013 season on loan at Sunderland that established him as a Premier League player, also the last in England for Bale before his £80 million move to Madrid. In his final game for Spurs, in May 2013, the Welshman scored a late winner against Sunderland with Rose, unable to play under the terms of his loan, watching from the stand.
Up against plucky Wales with their Madrid superstar, the England players know that they will be cast in many quarters as the presumptuous favourites, although they are also at pains to point out that nothing could be further from the truth. In spite of England’s general failings for the past 50 years, Rose acknowledged that they do seem to remain a target for other nations.
“I saw some comments of the Russian goalkeeper [Igor Akinfeev] saying that he was over the moon that they’d been drawn with England in the group. I’m fairly new into the England set-up and I’m seeing how a lot of teams want to beat England. They don’t like England. I can imagine it will be no different with Wales. Obviously I have a Welsh team-mate in Ben Davies back at Tottenham and there will be bragging rights to be had once we go back for pre-season. I’m sure Wales will be going into it with an extra edge looking to beat us.”
Rose comes fresh from a two-horse title race in which Spurs somehow conspired to finish third, having pushed Leicester City for much of the way. There was no question that the draw at Stamford Bridge was the decisive moment, a 12-booking, epic no-quarter-asked game in which Rose himself was part of one of the early flashpoints: that shoving match with Willian.
“I’ve apologised on behalf of Tottenham before for what happened in the game but strangely enough I wouldn’t change anything apart from the result,” he said. “I would have loved to have won, but how we fought for each other ... we’ve shown we’re not a pushover. Obviously I’d change the fact that Mousa [Dembélé] has been given a six-game ban. But this is why I play football, games like that.
“To feel the hatred from the Chelsea fans and the players beforehand – it was amazing. But I just wish I could change the result and the amount of bookings in the game. That’s now the first fixture we’re looking at next season – Chelsea at home and Chelsea away.”
That was quite a change of mood there from a softly spoken, thoughtful Doncaster boy, but no doubting the sentiment. Rose has had to be tough from the start of his career, when there was a time, he discovered recently, he was very close to being released by Leeds. He stayed on in a successful youth team and was the third player Chelsea wanted to sign – after Tom Taiwo and Michael Woods – in one of the first major academy transfer deals of the modern era.
He resisted, and his career path has been that much better. At Spurs he has been gently persuaded, first by Tim Sherwood and then Pochettino, to accept left-back as his position. For a relatively young player he has a remarkable roll-call of former managers, including Harry Redknapp; Brendan Rodgers, when he was on loan at Watford; Darren Ferguson, during his loan spell at Peterborough; Martin O’Neill and Paolo Di Canio at Sunderland, as well as André Villas-Boas, Sherwood and Pochettino at Spurs.
“When I’ve spoken to the manager [Pochettino] he’s always said he wants me to play with the same arrogance as Marcelo at Real Madrid,” Rose says.
“Every time he goes out he looks like he thinks he’s the best in the world, and Pochettino wants me to have the same arrogance when I play for Spurs. I think it comes with confidence. Towards the end of the season I felt very confident in my team and myself, and once I do get to that level I do start to take more risks on the ball. It’s something I enjoy. I start going on runs, and that only comes with us winning the games and having such a great team, as we do at Tottenham at the moment.”
He will not be marking Bale directly on Thursday, a responsibility for his Spurs team-mate Walker, but if Wales’s great superstar does take a wander over to the opposite wing he will know that the man waiting for him there is every bit as determined to come out on top.
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