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Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall: the performing arts lover and snooker assassin who ‘represents Leicester City’s future’​

Just sometimes it hits him: the journey, the fact at long last he is arriving. It happened at Christmas after Leicester City beat Liverpool at the King Power.

A game under floodlights, raucous festive crowd, prime time TV: Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall burnished this glamour occasion with his first Premier League assist, and made the most touches of any Leicester player, most passes, most pressures, and second-most dribbles and blocks.

After the post-match interviews and autographs he got in his car and drove up the M1 and down country lanes to the village of Shepshed, the same journey he has taken since joining Leicester at the age of eight. He went back to the same, ordinary house where he grew up and still calls home. Where his mum, Vanessa, and brothers and sisters live. Where his bedroom is the one he has had since a kid: same posters, same schoolboy trophies displayed on the shelves.


Suddenly his day was a little less ‘big-time’ again and Dewsbury-Hall just had to smile to himself.
“Play in the Premier League and come back to my little room in my mum’s house? It was funny after we beat Liverpool. I was just, like . . . this is crazy.”

Now he is looking for his own place, but if his lifestyle has not caught up with his status it’s forgivable, because nothing has been linear about his career. He is an outlier. In an industry where 97 per cent of elite academy footballers fail to make a single Premier League appearance, Dewsbury-Hall’s breakthrough was long past the age players are generally jettisoned if they have not already made the grade.
His first Premier League start, in December v Aston Villa, was three months after his 23rd birthday — Youri Tielemans had played 236 top flight games in three countries by a similar point.
Yet Dewsbury-Hall, whose surname sparks memes about stately homes, seems to the manor born, “a ready-made Premier League player,” as Brendan Rodgers says. With his pass-and-move, team-mindedness, and sunny enthusiasm, he is just the type Gareth Southgate likes in his England squad. So what held him back?


“Since I was a young teenager, I’ve always had to work harder than anyone else because I was a late developer. A lad who was smaller than everyone. At 15, I was 5’3. It got to the point where I said to my mum I need to go to the doctors here. I was genuinely worried. Why am I not growing?” Dewsbury-Hall recalls. He is now 5’10, but did not shoot up until 17 and at youth games heard every jib.
“I had them all. ‘Midget’, ‘oh, you’re so weak’. I could only counteract it with how I played. ‘Just give me the ball and I’ll show you.’”

He made a point of demonstrating size didn’t matter. “I got stuck in against the bigger lads. I was renowned for having battles with the biggest lad in our age group at Leicester, it was like David and Goliath. My mum worried. We had a lot of conversations. ‘Stick to getting on the ball and being clever, you don’t need to go into those tackles’. But I was, ‘mum, I’m physically underdeveloped, at least let me be mentally tough.’”

He seized every opportunity to impress Leicester’s academy staff. “I tried to win all the running drills and on the schooling side get the best grades. I got a distinction star for my BTEC and A star, two As and seven Bs for my GCSEs.”
On the pitch, he sharpened his scanning skills, honed the ability to find space and learned to know his next touch before receiving the ball — traits that are invaluable today.
“I couldn’t afford to take contact because I’d be in trouble, so I developed a way of thinking a bit quicker.”


His idol was Paul Scholes, pocket maestro supreme. “There’s not a YouTube clip of Scholes I haven’t watched,” he grins. Another template was N’Golo Kanté, “the smallest player on the pitch but the biggest in aura,” and he practiced with Kanté when he first trained with the first team, during Leicester’s 2015-16 title season — when at some games he was a ball boy. In 2016-17, at 18, he was a regular for Leicester Under-23 but then everything stalled again. Three seasons later, he was still playing for the under-23s.

“I couldn’t catch a break. Nobody in my position [from the first team] ever seemed to get injured. I was stagnating. I was thinking ‘I believe I’m good enough — but do other people? Is there something missing?’ There were tough periods.”
In the end pride kept him going. “I thought ‘I’ve been here half my life, I’d regret it if I chucked it away now. All those years of sacrifice, losing a lot of your childhood — to just bob it off now, how stupid would that be?”
So he kept putting shifts in for the Under-23s and slowly impressed Rodgers enough to be handed a first team debut — 22 minutes of an FA Cup fourth round win at Brentford in January 2020.

“That was a weight off my shoulders. I was so happy and grateful. From all those times wondering what’s going to happen to me, to be able to say I’ve been at Leicester since eight and now I’ve made my debut.”
A short but successful loan with Blackpool, in League One, followed and at the start of last season Dewsbury-Hall was determined to go on loan again. He had several good Championship offers, plumping for Luton Town, because of manager Nathan Jones.
“We met in a nice hotel off the M1. He sits down, gets his laptop out and goes into pitching me this whole presentation. It was an hour long. I probably said about five words.
“He had Y Scout clips, graphs, Venn diagrams, my strengths and weaknesses, all my data. He said ‘I’ve been to your Under-23 games, your Blackpool games, and this is the most excited I’ve been about a young player in a long time’. And he said — and reiterated it throughout the season — ‘you’ll be a Premier League player once you’re done with me.’”

Dewsbury-Hall was Luton’s player’s player of the year and, for a month before Leicester started pre-season, was at their training ground every day, doing workouts himself. “I wanted to Leicester to go ‘is that a different player?’ I wanted to be different physically, look different, be a boy to a man.’” The first day, Rodgers pulled him aside and said ‘you look a new person’ and when the squad did their bleep test, Dewsbury-Hall was – by a distance – last-man standing. The reward was a Premier League debut, as substitute, at Norwich, where Leicester fans hymned his name to the tune of ‘Wonderwall’.
This season has built from there – and since Rodgers pledged a shake up after an FA Cup disaster v Nottingham Forest, Dewsbury-Hall has started every game. He represents, says Rodgers, Leicester’s future.

However there was a time their relationship was tested. Dewsbury-Hall’s dad used to take him to snooker clubs (“I was such a bad loser that if he beat me I wouldn’t speak for a day”) and by 12, he was beating adults at pool and talented enough to consider a professional career. Rodgers knew none of this, in 2020, when he organised a pool tournament for Leicester’s players and staff and drew Dewsbury-Hall in the first round.
“The gaffer’s decent. He’d won the tournament the previous year. I thought ‘how do I go about this? Do I let him win or try my hardest?’ I beat him 2-0, hammered him.
“He was alright about it but I could tell in the back of my mind he wasn’t happy. A week later, I was at Luton on loan and he had a bye into the next round. Clever management, to be fair.”
His music taste is unexpected: George Michael, Michael Jackson, Luther Vandross, Spandau Ballet, 1980s stuff (he blames his stepdad, Rick) and Ministry of Sound (he credits mum).
“I love going to West End shows. That’s a guilty pleasure of mine. The last one I saw was Dear Evan Hansen, with my missus. I’m a massive fan of the performing arts.”
And his name? Dewsbury is mum’s surname and his dad (a Manchester United fan) is Terry Hall. At Blackpool they assumed he was a posh boy until the East Mids drawl came out of his mouth, but he does not mind the gags. “Isn’t there a stately home called Dewsbury-Hall? I’d like to visit there some time and take a photo. ‘Dewsbury-Hall is at Dewsbury Hall’.
“Honestly, I get as many messages on Twitter about my name as my football. Hopefully, over the next couple of years, it sways more to football and less to stately homes!”
There is a handsome Town Hall in Dewsbury, but in fact no grand country dwelling sharing a moniker with him. The way is clear for him to become the definitive Dewsbury-Hall.
The worst thing, during the long years of waiting for his chance, was talking to people on nights out, or extended family at gatherings, and getting the same question again and again.
“It would always be ‘when are you going to play then? Haven’t you made your debut?’”
“It’s the worst question ever, because what are you meant to say? And you’re thinking that they’re thinking ‘he’s not good enough if he’s not playing.’”
No doubts, no questions any more. “The manager says don’t take your foot off the gas because what makes a top player, rather than a top prospect, is consistency.
“And the way I see it now, I’m just at the bottom of the hill. I want to get to the top.
“I’m so hungry. This is just the start for me.”
 
Love the way he plays and judging by that he seems like a mature, smart lad too. God knows we need a few of them in football at the minute.
 
jb5000 said:
Not weird at all, lots of football clubs get things like this from the areas they represent.
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As far as I know, the Freedom of the City of Leicester has never before been awarded to a privately-owned organisation.

That they’ve also invented a new honour apparently designed specifically for the figureheads of the Srivaddhanapraba family is presumably just a coincidence?

It’s weird.
 
Blue Maniac said:
As far as I know, the Freedom of the City of Leicester has never before been awarded to a privately-owned organisation.

That they’ve also invented a new honour apparently designed specifically for the figureheads of the Srivaddhanapraba family is presumably just a coincidence?

It’s weird.
Click to expand...
Is it time for the picture of the Saddam Hussein statue again?
 
Blue Maniac said:
Aye, seems an appropriate comparison. Perhaps some of them cartoony portraits of the Kims or a shrine to some African billionaire despot.
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Imagine Birch as Rasputin.
 
Blue Maniac said:
As far as I know, the Freedom of the City of Leicester has never before been awarded to a privately-owned organisation.

That they’ve also invented a new honour apparently designed specifically for the figureheads of the Srivaddhanapraba family is presumably just a coincidence?

It’s weird.
Click to expand...

When i worked at Greggs we were awarded the Freedom of Newcastle. I think it meant our steak bakes could graze on the town moor.
 
fitz said:
When i worked at Greggs we were awarded the Freedom of Newcastle. I think it meant our steak bakes could graze on the town moor.
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I didn’t realise that we were in the midst of royalty.
 
Blue Maniac said:
Love a steak bake, me
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I used to have an office above the bakery. Smells like dog food when it's being made. We had the smell of dog food at 2 each day and then the smell of burnt toast at 4 (ringtons tea factory). Joyous times for the schnozz.
 
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