‘Only Declan Rice can decide if he wants to play for Ireland’

paul rowan

Josh Cullen believes English-born players should not be pigeonholed when deciding their international future

Nothing to see here”, says Josh Cullen, when it comes to hard-core tales from the front line, but his pleasant, even smile tells a different story. It was around this time last year in an FA Cup game between West Ham and Shrewsbury that Cullen was accidentally kicked in the mouth by an opponent, and one of his two front teeth was captured by the television cameras sailing through the air. After all the blood was mopped up, Cullen played until the end of the game 15 minutes later and only then did he head off to the nearby dental hospital.

“They put it in milk straight away,” says Cullen of his dislodged dental. “The calcium in the milk keeps the tooth alive. They say that you have 90 minutes from when the tooth came out to save it. It was back in about 75 minutes after it came out. The doctor said I should come off the pitch and go straight to the hospital, but the adrenalin was going and we were drawing away to Shrewsbury in the Cup. You just have the mentality to get on with it and worry later.”

Not quite on a par with another West Ham player, Stuart Pearce, trying to run off a broken leg, but Cullen’s dedication to his craft, his club and his country is wholly impressive. Cullen is currently on a season-long loan at League One side Charlton. Removing his boots before he entered reception, the Charlton manager Lee Bowyer was quick to recommend Cullen for international recognition and he is not one to dispense platitudes.

“My aim always has been and still is to play for the West Ham first team, at the highest level,” Cullen says. “But it’s better for me to be out playing and proving myself in a competitive environment rather than me, maybe, being in and around the squad, on the bench, maybe getting a little bit of game time, but nothing really where I can get a bit of momentum going and really work on my game.

“The manager here made it clear that he wanted me to come and be a big part of what he was trying to do. The position the manager played in and the career he had, I can learn off him. Little things about making the right runs into the box and your position when you are receiving the ball to give yourself some space.”

It was incidental that of late, Cullen dwelled in the shadow of Declan Rice at West Ham and with Ireland, but it wasn’t always that way. A couple of years older than Rice, Cullen remembers trying to calm the nerves of a jittery fellow teenager, who was afraid of getting left behind by West Ham, just as he had been a couple of years earlier by Chelsea.

“I dropped Dec home at his digs after training. His age group had just been offered scholarships and when you are offered a scholarship at 16 it is always sort of ‘are you going to get a pro contract offered as well at the same time’? Dec had just been offered a scholarship and he asked me ‘what do you think’? I said ‘don’t worry about it now. Just get your head down, work hard and that will come’. That is what he has done to be fair to him. Now he is playing in the Premier League and doing brilliant.”

On the million-dollar question about Rice’s international allegiances, Cullen’s advice has not been sought and nor is he particularly inclined to offer it. What he does caution against are any sweeping generalisations, having watched bright prospects in Irish football turn their backs on the senior team. At Republic of Ireland under-21 level in 2015, Cullen moved into a midfield vacated by Jack Grealish. As a 19-year-old from Essex who had just made his Premier League debut as a late substitute at Liverpool, it was inevitable that his Ireland allegiances would be also questioned.

He dismissed the idea and 17 appearances at under-21 level speaks even louder about his loyalty and commitment. Rice’s decision to pull back last year from committing to Ireland caught Cullen by surprise — “He had started playing for the senior team and the decision to say he was thinking about it came a bit late” — but he doesn’t want English-born players in the Ireland set up to be pigeon-holed just because of what Rice or Grealish did or did not do.

“Everybody is different. You have people like Callum O’Dowda in the first team who is an example of the other side. He wanted to play for Ireland and is a big member of the squad,” says Cullen, who insists that nobody at West Ham is trying to sway Rice one way or another. “Obviously, he has a bit of pressure in his own mind because he can’t make his own mind up, otherwise he would have chosen. It wouldn’t be fair for anybody to sit there and say ‘you should do this or that’. Only he can make that decision.”

Cullen himself played at under-16 level for England before he was put on standby for a couple of squads and decided to take up an offer to play for Ireland, his grandparents on his father’s side having hailed from Co Leitrim. “I went over and played in a trial game and never looked back, I was very proud to be captain of the under-21s and as soon as I made that decision to go over I did everything I could to make every trip.”

Mick McCarthy only has to walk out his front door of his home in southeast London to monitor Cullen’s progress. This is Cullen’s third loan move — the first at Bradford was successful, the second at Bolton Wanderers less so — and McCarthy will already be attuned to the fine season Cullen is now having. Rice, who has gone straight from the academy into the first team and was rewarded with a substantially larger new contract in December, is the exception. The rule applies to players like Cullen who have to be more patient.

“Dec has worked hard, he has done everything that was asked of him to get that contract. You don’t want to be chucking silly money at youngsters who haven’t really done anything and then they think ‘oh this is nice. I am at a Premier League club. I have got loads of money. Why do I need to go out on loan and prove myself’?”

For Cullen there is no other way.