Sometime recently, and he is not entirely sure when, it dawned on Harry Winks that it had been worth it, that the decisions taken to move sideways and backwards with the hope of one day moving forwards again had been the right ones.
Maybe it was when Leicester manager Steve Cooper asked him to be captain for a recent game against Manchester United. Or maybe it was before that, when Leicester won promotion from the Championship last May.
Or maybe it was more simple. Maybe it just came from the simple joy of playing regularly again.
‘The holy grail state of mind,’ as Winks calls it.
But it doesn’t really matter when it happened, just that it did. The lessons learned and the bruises healed had given way once more to opportunity, happiness and a feeling of forward travel.
Winks won 10 England caps and played in a Champions League final for Tottenham by the age of 23. But, after two decades associated with a club he joined when he was five and went to watch as a fan for the first time at six, he got spat out. Injuries didn’t help a loan move to Sampdoria in Italy. He arrived in August 2022 and didn’t play a minute until the following January. ‘Of course you feel guilty,’ he says.
So then it was to Leicester and the second tier of English football. Another bold move. But now he is here, sitting in a small room on a snowy afternoon at Leicester’s training ground, with a huge smile on his face. The second coming of Harry Winks is upon us.
‘I haven’t got a huge ego,’ Winks, 28, tells Mail Sport. ‘But maybe it did have to take a little hit to do what I did. But that’s normal.
‘I just made a pact with myself that I was gonna give it everything and leave the ego and everything at the door.
‘Because the minute you bring ego in to training or football you get punished. I didn’t want that. I had to move forwards again and I feel I have.
‘Being happy and enjoying driving in and seeing the lads and the staff and working at a place where you wanna be just feels priceless. It’s been like that every day here. It’s not work. It’s a club I have taken to really quickly and wearing the armband for that game as one of the highlights of my career.’
Leicester will face Chelsea at the King Power Stadium this Saturday lunchtime as the Premier League returns. Winks played top-flight football 128 times for Tottenham after debuting at the age of 20 in 2016.
A nimble, clever midfield player, he admits now that he thought he was set. He wasn’t. Injuries and a churn of managers at Spurs chipped away at his standing. By the time he left for Italy a little over two years ago, he had all but disappeared from view.
‘I found myself at the back end of my Tottenham career getting a little bit bitter,’ Winks admits. ‘You know that feeling that as an academy player when it’s always easier to drop you. The fans are the first ones to blame you if the team isn’t doing well.
‘You get to that point when you are in a bit of a rut and you need to get back to being positive and playing well and enjoying football again.
‘When you have been in the football industry for a while, you start to learn how it actually works. It’s not my football club. They don’t owe me anything. It’s business.
‘There is always gonna be that transitional period where it’s difficult to take. But when you start to feel a bit bitter and you are blaming each other then it’s time to part ways. I knew it was time and the club knew and that meant it was amicable and that’s great because I didn’t want any hard feelings.
‘The club had been amazing for me. I wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for Tottenham. Thankfully it’s worked out for me.’
Winks loved Italy, despite rolling his ankle in his very first training session. Surgery followed.
‘I wanted people to look at me and realise I was happy to travel and do what’s best for my career,’ he explains. ‘Overall I had a great experience out there.’
It turns out he has loved Leicester more, though. Some players go to the Championship and never come back. Some clubs do that, too. Enzo Maresca breathed life into Winks and the Midlands club and, with the 28-year-old starting 45 out of 46 games last season, Leicester came up as champions.
Maresca returns to the King Power on Saturday as Chelsea manager and Winks says: ‘He is a top coach. The way players here view football will never be the same again after working with Enzo. It’s really opened our minds to a new way of playing. He is showing how good a manager he is at Chelsea and we are all sure he is going to do really well there.’
Maresca’s view of football chimes with that of Winks. There are shades of it in Cooper’s strategies also. It’s about passing and about playing with freedom. The second part of that is of particular importance to someone like Winks, a player who will often receive the ball deep in dangerous defensive areas and look to initiate forward movements.
‘This is the most important thing in football,’ he says, warming to the theme. ‘I have come across many coaches who have said: “Make a mistake, it’s no problem, it’s football”. But they don’t mean it. Two days later your mistake is up on the big screen in the debrief.
‘But some managers will make sure you do know that if you make a mistake it’s their fault. They gave you the freedom to do it. So you go on the pitch feeling free and knowing it doesn’t matter. That’s the difference and there is a knock-on too. That knowledge means you then make less mistakes in the first place.’
Winks has also heard the debate about overplaying. Premier League highlights reels are awash with clips of deep-lying players getting themselves into trouble with the ball.
‘When you are on the pitch it’s not nearly as nail biting as some fans think it is,’ laughs Winks. ‘I do think keeping the ball is the best way. It’s the best form of defence.
‘It’s about confidence. I swear in those situations I feel calm. Since I was five years old I was encouraged to get the ball in those situations. To take it from the goalkeeper.
‘The alternative is that he kicks it 40 yards, the opposition win the ball and then they can score. Obviously it’s not just keeping the ball for the sake of it. But keeping it with the intention of having a plan is for me, yeah.
‘I don’t think you can really be mixed. I think it’s difficult. If you send mixed signals to players it’s difficult to know in what situation they are then supposed to play short, go long or look for second balls.
‘If you have players on different wavelengths and not sure what to do, it’s always difficult to get the best out of the team.’
Winks stresses several times that his immediate focus is Leicester. He has learned to look at the game in the short-term. But when Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville said recently that Winks could once again be valuable to England, he heard it.
‘Yeah I did see that,’ he nods. ‘It was nice to read praise from a player of that calibre. I always think about England of course and would love to be back in the squad.
‘But I know how England works. You have to be performing well for your team and you have to be in a position where you are probably quite high up in the league as well. That’s another one to think about it.
‘But since I came here my first priority has to be perform for Leicester - and everything else will take care of itself.’
Winks didn’t watch England’s recent Nations League games against Greece and the Republic of Ireland. Ahead of the domestic winter schedule that he expects to be as exacting as ever, he prioritised a mental reset and some time with his partner - pregnant for the first time - and their dog Belle.
He knows that it’s there, though, just as he knows there may well be more bumps in his road. Halfway through his career - if he is lucky - he knows where everything needs to sit in his head. It’s called experience.
‘You learn to become numb to stuff and I definitely went through that transition from feeling one way to how I feel now,’ he says. ‘I did get angry and look back. Back then I got frustrated and angry about how I went from one situation to another.
‘But that’s all gone now and the one thing I have realised is that it’s about finding the right club, one that wants you. That pivotal moment was probably when I came to Leicester.
‘You come through at 20 or 21 and you are playing and everything is great. Everyone is raving about you and you think: “This is easy”.
‘Then you get to a point where things may get a little bit bad and it’s like: “Oh god, I didn’t expect that to happen”.
‘You have to balance that. It’s about the challenge of staying positive and mellowing out and not getting too low or too high. And when you are young that’s a challenge.
‘Then you get older and you think that’s a lovely thing to hear from Gary Neville but you also know you have to focus on doing it again at the weekend, otherwise it means nothing.
‘And it’s Saturday and it’s Chelsea and you know you have to play well and then go back to thinking about the one after that. Applying yourself in training every day. And if it doesn’t go well then it’s okay because you know you can move on to the next one.
‘That’s what this life is essentially about.’
