SKY-HIGH WAGES CREATE A TOXIC ENVIRONMENT FOR STARS WHO FAIL
THERE have been times in the past 12 months when Jack Rodwell has seemed subconsciously to forget that football is passing him by. Asked in one interview about his desperate lack of games, he replied by saying he wanted to be back at his best to impress new England manager Gareth Southgate. Sunderland staff flinched, knowing that he would be pilloried by fans for having such pretensions having delivered so little for his £70,000-a-week wages. Some discreet representations were made and the comment was never made public. It comes to something when a former England player is so stigmatised that he dare not discuss the national team,
wisdom, to offer his agent a deal with no relegation clause attached. ‘Ridiculous,’ said one experienced sporting director when asked about that piece of contractual work yesterday. Ask around the game and it is very hard to find substantive evidence that Rodwell possesses the sense of entitlement or avarice which the outraged would like to believe. Rodwell’s TV interviews can seem rather plastic, dull and practised at times but staff at all of his clubs — Manchester City and Everton before Sunderland — speak of a willingness to participate off the field. A player’s manner with junior non-playing staff is usually a very good barometer of the individual and it has to be said that Rodwell has always passed that test. ‘Always respectful,’ says one source. It is hard to overstate how much once seemed to lie beneath his feet. Eight years ago next month, Everton manager David Moyes declared the club would learn from the mistakes of losing Wayne Rooney and keep the 18-year-old Rodwell, who’d just scored a goal straight off the school playground against Manchester United at Goodison. Yet after several years of transfer talk came a 2012 move to Manchester City that was shrouded in negativity. The newly crowned champions had been pursuing Eden Hazard and Robin van Persie and instead ended up with Rodwell and Scott Sinclair because Abu Dhabi had tightened the spending tap. Few City players buy houses when they join the club. They rent instead, because they all wonder what the future holds. Yet Rodwell did put down roots — buying in Prestbury, Cheshire. He threw himself into the new club where he would be plagued by injury for two years. The £10million move to Gus Poyet’s Sunderland in 2014 plunged him into a dislocated, shambolic club where it has not worked, either. Those who have observed him at close quarters describe an individual who has not seemed to slot into any of the dressing-room cliques. They feel that a sense of apprehension and a struggle to locate confidence might lie behind the solitary figure he has cut. That could point to an inability to deal with ‘setback and adversity’, which all coaches obsess about. Liverpool wondered about toughness when monitoring Rodwell in his early years at Everton’s academy. His future is dependent on a manager ready to take another punt on him and Everton’s Sam Allardyce is one who has seemed to see a quality. Otherwise, we might have seen the last of Rodwell at the top of football, at the age of 26. That, in microcosm, is the footballer’s precarious lot. It is also why Rodwell, with the rest of his life reaching out ahead of him, would be a fool to walk away into the sunset, telling Sunderland to keep the salary they were once so keen to pay.