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Drinkwater’s rise exemplifies hard-working, humble ethos at Leicester

By on March 14, 2016

There isn’t a single player in the Leicester City squad that hasn’t had to overcome some sort of professional adversity.  Being cast off from a big club or, in the case of scoring phenomenon Jamie Vardy, overlooked in the lower leagues, they have all grafted their way into England’s top division.

“I think that’s what makes the team so tight, that we’ve all got a point to prove,” Leicester midfielder Danny Drinkwater recently told the Daily Mail. “You take Marc Albrighton, such a huge part of our team and Aston Villa let him go. It’s bonkers. You can see how good a player he is. I think it’s a credit to us that teams really prepare to play Leicester now.”

Coach Claudio Ranieri has successfully focused that resolve into an almighty push for the Premier League title.  They’re now five points clear at the top of the table and with eight matches left to go, they’re nearly at the finishing line. Even so, they’re admirably steely-eyed; fixated on nothing but the next match.

Drinkwater exemplifies this hard working, yet humble ethos as well as anybody else at the King Power Stadium.  He has fought his way back towards the top of the table, after being released by Manchester United in 2012, having witnessed so many of his teammates in the academy fall out of professional football. He has played a key, yet unsung role in Leicester’s title charge and has appeared in twenty-eight of their thirty league games this season. Already, there are rumors that he may be called up to the England national team to join his club teammate, Vardy, ahead of Euro 2016.

As a rule of thumb, Drinkwater doesn’t often partake in interviews — a habit modeled off his idol at Manchester United, Paul Scholes — but recently sat down with Martin Samuel of the Daily Mail to cover lost ground.

Drinkwater played for the Unicorn Athletic Juniors as a kid and was spotted by the Manchester United academy at the age of seven.  He spent thirteen years with United and earned a trainee contract in July 2006. His class reached the 2007 FA Youth Cup final, losing on penalties to Liverpool.

That same year, he received his first taste of action for United’s reserves and earned his first call up to the senior team in early 2009.  He never made a senior appearance for the club, however, and was shuffled on a series of loans at Huddersfield Town, Cardiff City, Watford and Barnsley between 2009 and 2012.  The experience made him stronger, he says.

“I played with Danny Welbeck, Tom Cleverley, James Chester — it was a good group,” he told the Daily Mail.  “But there are some guys, some of them friends, who don’t play league football any more. They play in the Sunday leagues, which is unfortunate. I know that could have been me.

“I didn’t have as good an attitude as I should have. If someone else got an opportunity, I’d question it, rather than knuckling down.

“But you learn an awful lot when you see other players falling out of football. I still speak to a few of those boys now and you can sense the disappointment in them.”

He finally made the move to Leicester in January of 2012, right after he had signed a new deal at Old Trafford.

“The moment I heard they had accepted a bid from Leicester I knew it was over. I’d just signed a new deal and then, a week later, Leicester came in. It was Barnsley who told me the deal was done. I’d been 13 years with United but I didn’t even spend another full day back there. I got some things and I was gone.

“Initially, it hurt. I was gutted. But it wasn’t as if I was leaving for a proper lower-league side. I looked at the Championship table and Leicester were mid to bottom — but the owners had just taken over, Nigel Pearson was new in the job, so you could see the potential.”

In one of his first interviews at the club, he said: “I work hard when I’m given the chance.”  It was a polite plea given his lack of opportunities at United.

However, Pearson gave Drinkwater a starting role right in central midfield and in 2013, the Englishman earned a place on the shortlist for Championship Player of the Year as Leicester were promoted to the Premier League.  He earned a new four-year deal at the club and has now found his home in Ranieri’s starting lineup.  On his 150th appearance of the club in January, he scored against Stoke City, his first goal of the season, and his recent, crucial strike in Leicester’s 2-2 draw with West Bromwich Albion was ruled as an own-goal for the deflection it took.

Now he only keeps track of his old club Manchester United to make sure they’re not catching up with Leicester in the league table, but there if he hold any grudge with his former club, he does well to hide it.

“I’ve worked my socks off to get here now. I’m not blaming Manchester United,” he said. “I had lessons on what was needed to succeed hammered into me at their academy. Loads of players have gone on from there — but it needed bringing out in me. If you can knuckle down somewhere else, I’d say go and do it. Once I got to Leicester, I just wanted to prove myself.”

The experience has only made him hungrier for success, and alongside a brilliant assortment of other cast-aways and rebels, Leicester are proving everybody wrong this season.

Homepage photo credit: fourthandfifteen, via Flickr

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.