“GOING into Premier League games, I feel like laughing. It’s my dream, I’m here.” Walking into a media room, Sammie Szmodics moves and speaks with the confidence and swagger of a boy born and brought up in Essex.
He says that he loves having a point to prove. At 28, it has taken the forward a long time to make it in the Premier League. His first start after a move to Suffolk came away to the champions Manchester City, it took him just seven minutes to become a Premier League goalscorer.
Two weeks later he led the Republic of Ireland attack against England at a sold-out Lansdowne Road in Dublin. It has been a dream period for the man who finished the previous season as the Championship’s top goalscorer with Blackburn Rovers.
After scoring the first Ipswich goal in the Premier League for 22 years, Manchester City eventually hit back to win 4-1 courtesy of an Erling Haaland hat-trick. Asked if he has studied the Norwegian striker to pick up any tips on how to score goals at this level, Szmodics quipped “I think he watched me last season after I scored 33!”
The last of those goals came in a 2-0 win away to champions Leicester City, a result which kept Blackburn in the league. Comparisons have been drawn between Szmodics and Jamie Vardy who also became an established Premier League striker late in his career. At the end of the game the former England striker sought out Szmodics for a few words.
“He gave me a bottle of champagne,” Szmodics revealed. “He just said ‘congratulations’ for the season I had. It’s obviously something that he [didn’t] need to do. I don’t really know him on a personal level. It shows the character that he is.”
Growing up in Colchester, like many in the area, he dreamed of playing for West Ham United in the Premier League. When he was relegated out of the Championship with Peterborough just two years ago, that ambition seemed like a pipe dream.
Szmodics told his agent at the time that while he still believed he was good enough to play in the Premier League, he wasn’t sure his agent had the same faith in him. That summer he was signed by the new Blackburn Rovers manager Jon Dahl Tomasson, the former deep-lying Danish international who saw in Szmodics the potential to play at a higher level.
Szmodics told the Morning Star that working under Tomasson simplified his whole game.
“He doesn’t want you to take more than two touches of the ball. That sounds mental but it speeds up the play so much. It took a lot to get used to.
“He used to come in and when he took more than two touches in training, he’d stop it. I think when he first joined, it was like, ‘what is this geezer doing?’ We need to dribble with the ball. When we understood it, it worked an absolute treat.”
All of this is a far cry from when Szmodics, at the age of 19, was sent out on loan by Colchester to play for Braintree Town two days after scoring the winner for his club.
He spoke at length about the stark realities of playing in the National League. “It was a bit of a shock to me, training in the evenings, Tuesday and Thursday nights. Lads coming covered in paint from work. I think sometimes now you realise that it’s a proper shift these lads put in. People are fighting to pay their mortgage down there.”
