Winston Reid has spoken in glowing terms of the new young Hammers hero Declan Rice after the 18 year old’s Man of the Match performance against Spurs.
Speaking to the official site Reid said: “Declan is not really new [to senior football] because he’s been up with us for a while now. He’s always really willing to learn and is a good young kid and I’m really, really pleased for him.
“I remember when I was 18, coming in and playing senior football, so I’m really pleased for him.”
Of the game the Kiwi said: “Going to Wembley, it was always going to be tough as Spurs are a very good team, but we had a game plan and we stuck to it, dug in and put in a really good performance.
“I thought the boys worked really, really well, considering we played two days earlier [against West Bromwich Albion].
“It comes down to hard work. The guys have got good character and they’re putting in the hard yards on the training pitch and you can see we are getting the benefits and the results.
“We’ve gone to Wembley and got a point. We’d obviously loved to have won the game, but fair play to Spurs because they scored a good goal as well. We’ll take the point and move on.”
Agree with that Reid but in honesty he should be playing in your current position on the right side of defence. You watch Rice live and you notice how switched on he is for 90 minutes like Kante he is always watching what is happening and positioning himself accordingly he also has pace which can get himself out of trouble on the few occaisions he is out of position. We need to play him often for long enough that he makes mistakes and learns from them, all players make mistakes throughout their career wrapping him up in kid gloves is like us biting our noses to spite our faces he makes less mistakes a game than Reid makes every ten minutes on the right side of defence, just bed him in bring Reid on as a sub and rest him when he genuinely needs rest.