THE RISE AND RISE OF HARRY MAGUIRE
The Leicester defender is one of the cult heroes of England’s 2018 World Cup but it has not always been plain sailing in...
THE two goals are almost identical but they come seven years apart. For the first, just over 8,000 are at Boundary Park, Oldham, for a League One game on the opening day of the season, which is a passable summer’s day for a ground situated on the edge of the Lancashire Moors and 509 feet above sea level. Stephen Quinn is sizing up a corner for Sheffield United, freshly relegated from the Championship. The ball is well delivered and a familiar forehead connects. One day in the future a celebrated Sheffield Wednesday fan will try to shame that forehead and dub its owner ‘Slabhead’. But that story is yet to be written. Right now we are witnessing the first ever public use of that forehead to good effect.
‘It was a massive goal for me at the time,’ says Harry Maguire. ‘It was the first game of my first real season at Sheffield United and I was only an 18-year-old boy, so there were a lot of nerves. I scored to make i t 1- 0 and we won 2-0. It settled me right in for the season. It’s something that helped me grow as a player, helped me for the long run because it gave me great confidence that I could play men’s football.’
He scored in front of the end housing the United fans. A year or two before he might have been sat there among them. One thing irks him, however. ‘It was a bit of a dodgy celebration. I weren’t used to it, to be honest.’
He’s not wrong. It was something like a squat, with arms outstretched. He could perhaps be forgiven: his first goal for the club he grew up watching and supporting. It was only his sixth appearance for them.
Seven years on in Samara, Russia, on the fringes of Asia and on a genuine scorching summer’s day, something similar happens. In front of a global audience of hundreds of millions, that forehead was put to remarkably similar use. This time Ashley Young sized up the corner. Two and half thousand miles from Boundary Park, Maguire again rose above his defender and headed home against Sweden — England were heading to a World Cup semi- final. ‘ It was a good header against Oldham, to be fair,’ he says. ‘But maybe not as good as the one at the quarter-final!’
He has travelled a long way in seven and a half years. THE graph should show a steady rise through the leagues and on to international level. But it doesn’t work out that way. The trajectory has been a little wobbly. The move to a Premier League club works out smoothly enough, though at £2.5million it’s not exactly in John Stones territory. And Hull had only just stayed up the previous year, so they weren’t the most secure prospect. Still, he was 21 years old and life must have seemed good.
But it turned out he would be that defender chosen only for unnecessary cup competitions. He would make his Premier League debut, but only from the bench, coming on three times that season. He was making up the numbers.
‘It was a difficult time for me as I felt I should be playing,’ he says. ‘Obviously making the move, everyone questions you, whether or not you’ll make the step up. I made my Premier League debut but I wasn’t really in the squad many times. When you’re not playing you always question yourself.
‘ I always had great belief. I always felt like I should be playing. I was knocking on the manager’s door (Steve Bruce) every other week asking: “What’s happening? Why aren’t I in the squad?” He was saying: “Just be patient”. I kept saying: “I want to go out on loan!” Eventually he gave in to me.’
Which is how he ends up at Wigan at the bottom of the Championship in 2015. He played 16 times but they were relegated. ‘They were struggling but I just wanted to play,’ he says. ‘And it was a good time. It showed me I could play in the Championship, week in, week out.’
Still, Russia 2018 is just three years away and Maguire is already 22. It still seems a long way off.
‘I can’t be sent out on loan and be thinking I’m going to play for England,’ he says. ‘But you always envision it. You feel you can do it. But it does seem a long way away, especially when you’re in League One with Sheffield United and you’re watching England on TV and going to watch them in games. You can ask any young player in the lower leagues. They always dream of playing for England.’ WE have to talk about the meme. The meme is a global phenomenon. The initial tweet went viral after Samara and that header. In a picture taken after the last-16 win over Colombia, Maguire is seen leaning over a crowd barrier, nonchalantly chatting to a female England fan in the crowd. Kyle Walker, fellow Sheffield United fan and defensive partner, tweeted the photo with the caption: ‘So a good header doesn’t hurt ... Know what I mean love?’ Apart from the 71,000 retweets and the 274,000 likes, it will spawn thousands of memes.
It seemed to assume a significance beyond the silliness of the tweet. That it features Maguire is one element.
He is perhaps the player with whom fans empathise the most, most likely because he is one of them, a wannabe who travelled to France to watch the team at Euro 2016. And all for a dismal 0-0 draw with Slovakia.
Of course, it’s Walker’s humour as well. This England team seem accessible and funny. Maybe it’s Maguire’s pose: you could imagine him in another life, spinning this yarn at a Chesterfield nightclub, attempting to impress a local girl. ‘The funny thing that came out was people thought I was speaking to a random girl, when it was my fiancee,’ says Maguire.
It was of course, Fern Hawkins, who has more reason than most to object to it constantly reappearing. ‘She’s not happy it keeps getting passed around because she’d been soaked in beer [in the photo]. But it’s great, it’s fun, I keep seeing it flying around Twitter.’
Most notably two weeks ago, when Walker gave it another outing to troll Liverpool when Maguire scored an equaliser against them, opening up the title race. Maguire smiles. ‘I saw he deleted it!’ Apparently there are limits on how ready we are for footballers to have actual personalities.’
But it was almost as if a humorous tweet had encapsulated the renaissance of the national team.
‘I think it showed what we were all about,’ says Maguire. ‘ The interaction we had with you guys — the media — and the fans back home. The group, the tightness.