How England won the battle with Ireland for Jack Grealish and Declan Rice

This is an updated version of an article first published in July 2021.

The press conference was running suspiciously late. In the next room, a commotion was going on. All the talk was of Jack Grealish and several rows of Irish journalists were starting to wonder what the hold-up was all about.

The date was May 12, 2015, and a nation was waiting to usher in the player who, six years later, would become the first £100million ($131m) footballer in the Premier League.

Grealish was 19, fresh-faced, with none of the stubble that we see now, and he had been pencilled in to win his first senior call-up to Republic of Ireland’s squad for two games at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium. The first was a friendly against England, followed by a European Championship qualifier against Scotland. The print-outs were waiting to be handed out: a provisional 33-man squad with Grealish, then of Aston Villa, as the stand-out name.

But there was a problem. As the journalists waited for the official announcement, they became aware that Ireland’s manager, Martin O’Neill, was in the next room and talking agitatedly to someone on the phone, possibly Grealish himself. An official came through to apologise for the delay. Then the news started to filter through that another squad list was being printed off. This one had no Grealish. The sheets of paper were still warm as they were handed around.

As one former official from the England setup, speaking on condition of anonymity, recalls: “We had to do everything we could to stop Jack playing in those games because that would have meant losing him forever. He was too talented for us to give up on him. Everyone can see now why we had to act.”

He is coming up to 29 now, with 36 caps for England (and counting), and it can feel like a trick of the imagination that Grealish wore Ireland’s colours from the under-15s right through to their under‑21s. Grealish has a trophy at home for Ireland Under-21s’ player of the year. His acceptance speech noted that “hopefully next year I’ll be back in the green jersey”. Note the “hopefully”.

It turned out to be his farewell speech, too.

He has never been back and, with the two nations due to meet in Dublin on Friday, perhaps these are the moments when the relevant people within the Football Association can reflect on how they lured him away and feel entitled that they did the right thing gazumping their Irish counterparts.

The same applies to the other player in England’s squad with a £100m price tag and a background that, for a long time, involved wearing a green national shirt rather than a white one.

Declan Rice, like Grealish, was also firmly embedded in the Irish setup, with three senior caps, before the English FA set about persuading the midfielder, then at West Ham, to switch allegiances.

There is footage online of a 19-year-old Rice turning to the fans in Tallaght Stadium, Dublin, after a goal for Ireland’s under-21s and kissing the badge on his shirt. When he made his senior debut against Turkey, the player who went on to become the most expensive footballer in Arsenal’s history talked about having tears in his eyes as the national anthem was played. It was, he said, the proudest moment of his life.

Declan Rice is now integral to England (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

All of which, it is fair to say, was thrown back at Rice six months later when he asked to be left out of a Nations League tie in Wales – not long after England had reached the 2018 World Cup semi-finals – because the FA had started fluttering its eyelashes in his direction and he was in two minds about what he should do.

Kevin Kilbane, who played 110 times for Ireland, chose X to make his irritation clear: “I’d rather be ranked 150th in the world, and never qualify again, than have someone who has played (for Ireland) but needs time to think whether they should play for us again.”

Rice’s announcement that he was abandoning Ireland came nine months later, aged 20, describing himself as a proud Englishman but explaining that it had been one of the harder decisions he had ever had to make.

“If you’re a ‘proud Englishman’ then why play for us in the first place?” Kilbane responded.

For the FA, it was always going to be a delicate process but one that English football’s governing body can argue was necessary, vital even, given the ability and importance of the two players.

Grealish comes from Solihull, just outside Birmingham, with English-born parents, Kevin and Karen, and a great-great-grandfather, William Garraty, who won the FA Cup with Aston Villa in 1905 and was capped by England. Kevin was there when Villa won the European Cup in 1982. He drank in the New Aston Social Club, just down the road from Villa Park, and the popular story was of Jack, as a boy, playing football in the car park. The accent? Pure Brummie, mate.

Yet Grealish’s Irish links were not just restricted to the fact he used to play Gaelic football for the Birmingham-based John Mitchel’s Hurling and Camogie Club. One of his grandmothers was from Dublin. One grandfather was from Gort, the other from Kerry.

Grealish was invited to train with England’s under-16s and under-17s on three separate occasions but seldom gave the impression to the coaches that he was entirely comfortable.

“Although born and bred in England, he saw himself with Ireland because of his family’s background,” says John Peacock, then coach of England’s under-17s. “At that time his allegiance was towards the Republic, though we always knew there was an opportunity to change that at some point.”

Rice was raised in Richmond, south-west London, but qualified for Ireland because his grandparents, Margaret and Jack, were from the outskirts of Cork. In 2017, Rice collected Ireland’s under-17s’ player-of-the-year award in Dublin, dressing for the occasion in an emerald tie.

For two of his three senior caps, against Turkey and the U.S., he was man of the match. In the third, he held his own against a France side that won the World Cup six weeks later. When he was asked about the speculation that he might defect to England, he described it as a “load of crap”.

Tim Weah and Declan Rice during the Republic of Ireland’s 2-1 win over the U.S. in June 2018 (Andrew Surma/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

What has never been reported is how, behind the scenes, the FA formed its strategy to win this international tug-of-war — Grealish on Roy Hodgson’s watch, Rice on Gareth Southgate’s say-so — and the background to a process that went on for several years.

In both cases, it was Dan Ashworth, then the FA’s director of elite development, who set the ball rolling by contacting the players’ representatives. Ashworth, now the sporting director of Manchester United, was essentially putting out the feelers without wanting to come on too strong.

Southgate, then England Under-21 manager, made a confidential call to Grealish. Peacock, meanwhile, made contact with the Grealish family. His assistant, Kenny Swain, did, too, and that was clever on the FA’s part — Swain was one of Villa’s heroes from the 1982 European Cup final.

“Jack was torn,” says Peacock. “We had already tried to move Jack away from the Republic and persuade him to come to England when he was younger. I touched base with the club, I touched base with Jack, but it was mainly Kenny who had the in-depth discussions with them. Kenny, being an Aston Villa player of repute for many years, was the one.”

Swain managed England’s under-16s and was widely regarded as one of the best talent spotters in the business. “Our talent ID team at the FA had identified Jack at 15, but he had chosen to go to the Republic because they kept giving him opportunities at older age groups,” he says. “That was always a bit of an obstacle for us, but you have to be patient. It was inevitable they (the FA) would try to get him because he was pulling up trees for Villa.

“I had already given him three opportunities to come to England — not to play for England, but to be involved, come to the development camp and one of the Victory Shields (youth tournaments). On a couple of occasions, he went home early. One was an injury, one was because he said he felt ill and the medics thought they should let him go back. At that age, you don’t put pressure on players.

“There was a break of a year to 18 months and in that time, John went over to Ireland to watch him. He (Grealish) was on our doorstep anyway at Villa and we’d had him in. I’d invited him to St George’s Park to meet Noel Blake, who was our under-19s manager, and Dan Ashworth. We were all over it because we knew he had potential. Nevertheless, pinning him down to a commitment was difficult because the Irish were giving him more opportunities.”

Grealish playing for England at the Toulon tournament in May 2016 (Bertrand Langlois/AFP via Getty Images)

A source close to the situation, kept anonymous to protect relationships, says it eventually led to a meeting, arranged on a strictly need-to-know basis, between Grealish and Hodgson on a Friday night at Villa Park early in the 2015-16 season.

Grealish, then 19, had taken a year-long sabbatical from international football to gather his thoughts. An injury meant him watching from the stands as Villa lost 1-0 to Manchester United. Then, an hour or so after the final whistle, he was led to an executive box where Hodgson was waiting for him.

When Grealish was invited to a previous meeting with O’Neill, he was accompanied by his agent, David Manasseh, as well as his father. Hodgson, though, was adamant that he did not want an agent involved. He preferred to speak to Grealish one-on-one and, as far as he was concerned, it was non-negotiable.

“I’m the England manager,” Hodgson later explained at a press conference in September 2015. “Agents speak to club directors and maybe even club managers but, as England manager, I don’t speak to agents. I’m more than happy to speak to the boy, I’m more than happy to speak to his manager and more than happy to speak to his parents, but I don’t go to meetings where an agent sits there and tells me.”

Hodgson’s message to Grealish was that he could not guarantee him a place, the same as he couldn’t with any player, but that England had always kept tabs on him and wanted him to be part of their future.

Grealish listened, took it all in and gave the impression that, yes, he liked what he had heard. First, though, he sought the advice of Tim Sherwood, then Villa’s manager.

“He was under a bit of pressure,” Sherwood recalls. “My view was that, ultimately, it’s down to the boy, it’s where he feels his heart is. He’d played for Ireland’s under-21s and they’d given him the trophy for young player of the season, which was them trying to force the issue. He was having a good time with Ireland. But I said to Jack, ‘If you were my son, and I believe in you as I do, I’d be telling you to play for England’.

“Maybe it would have been different if Jack was Irish through and through. In the past, certainly in my era, Ireland had a good history of getting to later stages of tournaments and pulling off some shocks. I just felt that if England could get it right, they could actually win a tournament. I know people can turn that back on me and say, ‘Hang on, England haven’t done anything since 1966’, and I understand that.

“I just always felt there would be a time when England could do it. I told Jack that: ‘First and foremost, I think you’re good enough, I think you’re an England international, but it has to be your decision’. And he said, ‘I think I have made my mind up, it’s going to be England’.”

Grealish and Rice in the gym at St George’s Park (Eddie Keogh – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)

It was controversial and, inevitably, there was a backlash, but it has never been straightforward anyway. As a young player, Grealish’s involvement with Ireland created a few problems when he was breaking through at Villa. He would come up against Irish players from other Premier League sides who would try to get under his skin. Some, it was said, would call him a “plastic Paddy”.

When he announced his switch to England, he opened himself to more of the same, only worse. More than once, he was told on the pitch what some Irish players thought of his decision — heat-of-the-moment stuff, perhaps, but not very pleasant, all the same. One incident became so intense that one of Grealish’s senior team-mates had to step in.

Then there was the added complication that Roy Keane, O’Neill’s assistant, held a similar role at Villa under Paul Lambert, who had replaced Alex McLeish as manager. And Keane was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

“There was a lot of pressure on Jack at that time because the stories were making headlines,” says one of Grealish’s former Villa team-mates, who has asked to remain anonymous. “He had represented Ireland and felt a degree of responsibility, but he was English and he would say that to us. That’s why I always knew that he would decide to play for England in the end.

“It wasn’t that easy, though, because Roy Keane was our assistant at the time. He was always in Jack’s ear, trying to get him to play for Ireland.”

Grealish sits behind Keane on the Villa bench at Stoke City in August 2014 (Chris Brunskill/Getty Images)

Don’t assume it was always fun for Rice either, after the long telephone conversation with Southgate that helped to persuade him to align himself to the country where he was raised.

Rice had to endure a backlash that involved online threats against him and his family — even if it was also true that many of the people he had come to know in the Irish setup wished him luck and understood his decision.

He, like Grealish, has also had to face the allegation that maybe it was done for commercial reasons because playing for England can attract more sponsors and be more lucrative than playing for Ireland ever would.

Mick McCarthy, who had replaced O’Neill as manager, talked publicly about Rice being a future Ireland captain and building the entire team around him. McCarthy and his assistant, Robbie Keane, had been to see Rice and his father, Sean, to tell them something similar. Deep down, however, McCarthy felt it was a lost cause. His suspicion was that he, and Ireland as a whole, was being strung along.

When Rice rang him to break the news, McCarthy unloaded several months of pent-up frustration. “I was very abrupt,” McCarthy told the From the Horse’s Mouth podcast in 2020. “There was no, ‘Oh, thanks for letting me know, good luck with that and I hope it goes well for you’. It was the opposite of that.”

West Ham were brought into it, too. Did they influence Rice’s decision? “You have to look at the club,” Ray Houghton, the former Ireland international, told Talksport. “Transfer fees are much higher for players playing for England.”

As for the players Rice left behind, there were mixed views when Rice started establishing himself in an England shirt.

“He said he was a proud Irishman,” James McClean, one former team-mate, told RTE, an Irish television station. “Then he said he was a proud Englishman. If he’s both, good luck to him, but I don’t buy it. You’re either one or the other. It’s not just Declan, it’s anyone else. If you’re not proud to be here and we (Ireland) are a stepping stone, then sod off and play for someone else.”

Maybe Rice does not need to worry about that now. At the age of 25, his international career consists of 58 England caps, a World Cup and two European Championships.

“I’d seen Declan from a young age,” Swain says. “I remember thinking, ‘Blimey’. If I was still at the FA, I’d have included him way before. He was not just a good player, he was a leader. I could see he could play centre-back or midfield, but he also had leadership qualities.”

Rice celebrates with his Ireland Under-21 team-mates in October 2017 (Matt Browne/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

There are also plenty of people who want to make the point that nationality is an intensely personal issue. It is possible, they say, for somebody to feel English and Irish and maybe that requires understanding, not condemnation.

Emmet Malone, the Irish Times writer, summed it up neatly when he reminded everyone that FAI (Football Association of Ireland) supposedly meant ‘Find Another Irishman’ in the days when their most acclaimed manager, Jack Charlton, used to take full advantage of the so-called ‘granny rule’.

Houghton, for example, ended up playing for Ireland because Charlton had gone to a match at Oxford United to ask John Aldridge if he would accept a call-up and found out in the process that Houghton’s father was from Donegal. A year after scoring the winner against England in Euro ’88, Houghton admitted he still did not feel “the slightest bit Irish”.

Or how about the famous story of Andy Townsend, who cheered on England against Ireland when the two sides met in 1988 and played against the country of his birth in the World Cup two years later?

“I remember the Townsends, the Cascarinos and all the other English guys in the Ireland team,” Sherwood says. “They were more Cockney than I am.”

As for Kilbane, he grew up on the same street in Preston, northwest England, where Tom Finney, one of the most celebrated names in English football history, spent his childhood. Deepdale, home of Preston North End, was just around the corner and Kilbane’s accent was Lancashire rather than Limerick. That might make him English in many people’s eyes, but Kilbane always considered himself Irish, via his parents, and tells the story in his autobiography about his embarrassment when the FA called him up, out of the blue, for England’s under-18s.

Sam Allardyce, then Preston’s manager, went purple — “The colour of the Anderlecht home kit,” Kilbane recalls — and chucked him out of his office when the teenager broke the news that he had no intention of playing for England. Kilbane went on to win 110 Irish caps, though not everyone agreed with his assessment of Rice’s decision. Richie Sadlier, who won one cap for Ireland, described Kilbane’s remarks as “monumental bollocks”.

All that can be really said for certain is that it hasn’t been an orthodox route for either Rice or Grealish and that it is a sensitive subject for the nation that lost out on both players.

Some journalists in Ireland questioned why O’Neill had not foreseen what might happen and included Rice in a competition fixture — namely a World Cup qualifier against Moldova in 2017 — to ensure he was tied to the Irish setup.

O’Neill politely declined to take part in this article but addressed the issue in his autobiography, recalling there were some aggressive questions at the media conference before his final match in charge.

“For the umpteenth time, I’m quizzed about Declan Rice, a young West Ham United player who was born in England and may well choose to play for the country of his birth,” he wrote. “I have visited him at his dad’s house and have actually capped him three times at senior level in friendly games, but the choice is his. I cannot understand the continual harassment of me on this issue.”

Martin O’Neill tired of questions over Declan Rice’s international future (Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

Noel King, formerly the manager of Ireland’s under-21s, did not want to take part in this article either. It is too sensitive. And it went down badly with McCarthy, to say the least, when Rice was named Ireland’s young player of the year in March 2019, just a few weeks after FIFA ratified his switch to England.

McCarthy told the journalists who had cast the votes for Rice that they had “made everyone look stupid”. But he did also make a separate confession, on that podcast in 2020, that went to the heart of the issue: “I felt a bit bitter and twisted, but that was because we had lost a good player.”

The same goes for Grealish — “The closest I’ve ever seen to Paul Gascoigne,” Sherwood says — and maybe it is not a complete coincidence that Keane, in his role as a television pundit, has sometimes seemed reluctant to praise him too much.

Keane, that prolific bearer of grudges, never forgot the time Matt Holland — born in Bury, northwest England, but eligible for Ireland, with 49 caps to show for it, because he had a grandmother from County Monaghan — lined up at Wembley in the colours of Ipswich Town.

“For me, Matty is as English as David Beckham,” Keane wrote in his autobiography. “He played for Ireland and he obviously has the roots, but he played for Ipswich in a play-off final, in 2000, and he was singing God Save the Queen at the top of his voice. I don’t think he could have sung it any louder. Some of the other Irish lads saw him, too, so at the next couple of international matches, we were going, ‘Turn that rebel music up a bit’.”

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