China was good fun but Newport is home
IT HAS taken eight years, 15 clubs and 13,000 miles of travelling the world, but Frank Nouble believes he has finally found his home.
In 2009, the world lay at his feet. The 17-year-old was offered his first professional contract at Chelsea but went instead for immediate Premier League gratification by snubbing it and moving to West Ham.
He made his debut as a late substitute against Wolves before facing Tottenham for the first time at Upton Park still more than a month before his 18th birthday.
Tomorrow Nouble faces them again in the FA Cup fourth round. He is 26 now and plying his trade with League Two Newport County, grateful for the job having scoured the world for employment as far afield as Beijing and Inner Mongolia.
Regrets? Don’t be silly. As far as Nouble is concerned, life is too short.
“I always get asked the same questions, ‘Do I regret leaving this place? Do I wish I had gone there earlier? Or left earlier?’” he said.
“If I had stayed maybe I could have been something different.
“But I have done so many things over the years that I wouldn’t wish to have done anything else.”
After a series of free transfers and “more loans than Wonga”, as his former Ipswich manager Mick McCarthy once put it, Nouble has finally stood out from the crowd when he headed east – not least because all the other foreigners in the Chinese Super League were multi-millionaires. “Players are supposed to go to China when they have made a name for themselves,” he said.
“Although I had done some good things in football it was nothing compared to the likes of Oscar and Carlos Tevez. But I just wanted the experience.
“I went out there to enjoy it and thought, ‘Why not stay there?’”
Why not indeed, you feel, when he talks through the lifestyle he enjoyed at Tianjin Quanjian, a handy 60-mile commute from Beijing.
“The lifestyle was very different – a lot more relaxed,” he said. “For example, I didn’t drive so I was driven or got a taxi everywhere.
“Gas bills, electric bills, stuff like that, was all taken care of by the club.
“Plus when you are a tourist it is good fun finding out about things.
“I went to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong – so many of their different cities – any opportunity that I could, just to experience it.
“All you want to do is enjoying being where you are. And where I was in Beijing, the weather was very different the whole year round.
“We would train in the afternoon at 3 o’clock so you could lie in during the morning, which meant you could have a heavy dinner the night before and sleep it off.”
It was not so much that Nouble had wasted his football talents as used them to open interesting but somewhat unconventional doors for himself.
However, the arrival of his daughter was a lifestyle wake-up call.
A foreign-player quota system had already begun to sour things for Nouble in China and he arrived back in England just two days before the birth of Nyah Eve.
After unsuccessful spells at Gillingham and Southend, he ended up at Newport, a community so galvanised by their cup success this year that actor Michael Sheen yesterday fronted a video promoting the town together with the club’s forthcoming match against Harry Kane and Co. “My daughter and being with my partner every day has made if feel more like home,” said Nouble.
“I just want to make somewhere we are a little bit more homely.
“There is always a place where you feel you really belong and you want to set down your foundations. Maybe it just had not happened for me for one reason or another.
“But goodness knows, I’d tried enough places!”
Frank had more loans than Wonga