Ben White: ‘I didn’t play very well then I got Covid. It was hard’

Nowadays Ben White’s choice of match-day food does not stray too far beyond pasta, but he remembers a time when Newport County had different ways to get their squad fired up. It was the 2017-18 season and White was on loan at the League Two club from Brighton, taking his first significant steps in a professional career that at one stage appeared to have slipped away. “It was one of the best years of my life,” he says. “You go there and everything is completely different. You’re having curry for your pre-match meal.”

The smooth edges of academy football could not have felt further away and that was reinforced when, at half-time of his debut, White witnessed what he describes as “a punch-up between our own players in our own dressing room”. In fairness he does not suggest his present-day Arsenal teammates are shrinking violets and they have certainly not bowed to anyone on the pitch. He is in the England squad for the first time since Euro 2020 and that is because it would be hard to find a Premier League centre-back in better form. White might not fit the hackneyed portrait of a swashbuckling, gnarled international centre-half but he has toughness in spades, along with a perceptiveness on the ball that has added fresh dimensions to Mikel Arteta’s lines of attack.

“It shows that what I’ve done this season is really paying off,” says White, sitting in a meeting room at St George’s Park. There were plenty who failed to see sense in Arsenal paying Brighton £55m for him last summer: he had, after all, been dodging the flying fists at Rodney Parade only three years previously and had played only 36 times in the Premier League. But his stature grows by the week and it seems a long time since a torrid debut in which Ivan Toney