England aim to end a 60-year blemish by winning this summer’s World Cup, and Arsenal star Declan Rice knows a thing or two about ending the long wait for a trophy.
Declan Rice helped end Arsenal’s 22-year wait (Image: Visionhaus/Getty Images)
Declan Rice has claimed England are ready to follow in the footsteps of Arsenal by ending their long wait to win the World Cup. Rice helped Arsenal win their first Premier League title in 22 years and he says he sees the same “fire” in his England team-mates to do the same this summer.
England have not won the biggest prize since 1966 and, after close calls in recent major tournaments, Rice believes they can finally achieve it this time. Gunners midfielder Rice said: “I think it’s about not getting distracted and focusing on the job. I think that’s what I’ve done at Arsenal this year. There’s definitely a desire to win more.”
“We’ve had a few close calls over the last few years of finishing second, but this year we’ve noticed a difference in blocking out the outside noise, focusing on what we’re good at, and working hard internally to achieve what we’ve been doing.
“And we obviously achieved that. And it feels like here in England we lost two Euro finals. And we’re keen to take another step forward and we believe we can do that.”
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Rice also believes England are seeing new manager Thomas Tuchel in this tournament, which will help him raise his own standards and help the team achieve “great things” under him. England star Rice described him as “incredible” and cited the importance of his team talk, including the half-time talk against Croatia that led to England’s opening group win in Dallas.
Rice told ITV: “I’ve always known and watched what he’s like as a manager and I feel like he’s grown in this environment. I feel like he knows that. He knows he’s one of the best. We know he’s one of the best. We know he’s one of the best players.”
“And with this team of ours, we can accomplish great things with him. It’s obviously our responsibility to achieve that. Certainly, he said that as a human coach, and he’s been unbelievable as an in-game coach. We knew the whole game plan, we knew exactly how we wanted to play, and that was the question at halftime.”
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Declan Rice is loving life under Thomas Tuchel (Image: Juan MABROMATA/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s something we’ve been working on, but he didn’t like what he saw in the first half and said exactly what he felt. It just gave us a completely different perspective on the game of football.”
“That’s something you don’t normally hear from a manager at half-time and I think that’s what we all needed to hear. You’re kind of hearing it thinking, ‘Wow.'” He’s so spot on. And we receive him every day. He had a nice, great meeting this morning and said some really good things. Therefore, it is always up to us. ”
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