Nathaniel Clyne: ‘Klopp taught me to keep fighting and play with confidence’ | Football

Eventually, Nathaniel Clyne began to get irritated by all the questions. How’s the injury? How long left? When are you going to be back? He knew people meant well. But when you are trying to fight your way back, the last thing you want or need is pity. What you need, above all, is time and space.

The time wasn’t a problem. As he watched most of Liverpool’s 2019-20 title-winning season from the sidelines, recovering from an anterior cruciate ligament injury, Clyne had plenty of time to gather his thoughts. “I think I went through everything on Netflix,” he remembers. “Just duvet days, chilling at home watching movies and documentaries.”

Deep down, he also realised that his fifth season at Liverpool would be his last. As his teammates blitzed their way to a first league title in 30 years, Clyne remained somehow peripheral, tangential, at the edge of things. Somewhere along the line, among all the injuries and the restarts, Jürgen Klopp’s team had moved on from the right-back in whom such hope and promise had been invested when he signed from Southampton in 2015.

Likewise, Clyne had long since moved on from Liverpool. It was time for a change. Time to go home. “There were a few choices on the table,” he said. “But none of them appealed as much as Crystal Palace.”

And so he came home, back to the club where it all began as a brittle eight-year-old with an abundant talent and a thirst for improvement. When he left Selhurst Park in 2012 they were a struggling Championship team. “Look at Palace now,” he enthuses. “An established Premier League team. We’ve really got a foothold in the league.”

This is by some distance the most successful era in Palace’s history: an eighth successive season in the top flight, a squad stuffed with international stars. And yet through all of this they have never quite lost their homespun feel: a club firmly rooted in their locality and community, “south London and proud”, as per the banners draped over the seats in the absence of fans to fill them.

It is why so many alumni end up returning, from Clyne to Wilfried Zaha to the sporting director, Dougie Freedman, to the assistant manager, Ray Lewington, to the current manager, a Croydon boy and former Palace trainee by the name of Roy Hodgson. “It’s a thrill being back,” says Clyne, whose attachment to south London stretches to a tattoo of Stockwell underground station on his arm. “It just feels like home.”

The area where Clyne grew up has changed radically in the years since his childhood. The Brixton estate where he lived now looks out on to a fancy restaurant and a hot yoga studio. But through it all, he has kept the same friends, kept the same connections, kept the same hunger. He went back to his old school a few years ago to hand out kits and do some coaching. And happily, a few things haven’t changed.

“Player-wise, it’s just Wilf,” replies Clyne when asked who still remains at the club from his first spell. “But there’s loads of staff behind the scenes: in the kitchen, security, stadium staff, a few faces I remember. I’ve moved back into London, I’ve got a nice home, and settled in really well.”

On the pitch, too, the bedding-in process has been swift. Despite not playing a competitive game for almost 18 months on his arrival at Palace, Clyne has slotted straight into Hodgson’s first-choice XI, playing seven games in a row before getting a well-earned rest against West Ham in midweek. That, you suspect, was a decision taken with one eye on Palace’s Saturday lunchtime assignment: a home game against Liverpool.

How does he feel about what Liverpool achieved while he was there, European and then Premier League champions, and yet largely without him? “Yeah, I missed out on that,” he says ruefully. “It just makes you more hungry, though. To see the team having success just pushed me to get better, and get back as quickly as I could. All credit to Liverpool for what they achieved, and I’m just glad that I was a part of it.”

What did Klopp teach him? “Just to keep fighting. You can see he’s hungry for the players to play at 100%. That’s what he demands from his players: just to give it all on the pitch. That’s what I’ve learned from him: to play with 100% and to play with confidence as well.”

Certainly Palace have been playing with more confidence this season: a team with all the customary Hodgson solidity but a certain added flair, the goals of Zaha firing them to 12th in the table.

“He’s definitely improved,” says Clyne of the wide forward he first glimpsed as a 15-year-old in the Palace academy. “Everyone knows that he had the skills. It was about adding the end product, which I think he has now. I’m not surprised there’s interest from the big clubs. That’s what happens when you’re on top of your game. He’s becoming the complete player.”

As for Clyne himself, on a short-term contract, there are always certain lingering question marks over any player returning from a long-term injury. But so far this season, he can scarcely have done more to address them.

“When you go into 50-50s and you feel good, that’s the main thing,” he explains. “Knowing that you’re strong, and you’re not going to get injured. I’m feeling that at the moment. I feel like I’m back to my best, and enjoying it.”

One of Palace’s great self-made talents is back home at last. Now, you feel, is where the hard work really begins.