Brentford’s Rico Henry: ‘Teams said I was too timid, not big enough. It gave me more fire’

“I t’s heartbreaking,” Rico Henry says as he thinks back to his childhood and remembers trials ending with clubs telling him he was too short to become a footballer. “Especially when you’re young. You can’t do anything about it. But I sort of knew it would work out. I had a lot of pace. I looked up to left-backs like Jordi Alba, who’s short. Marcelo and Ashley Cole weren’t the tallest. I always believed in myself. I knew there were other players in the same position who were a similar height to me.”

Brentford’s 5ft 7in left-back laughs and says being rejected by Aston Villa, Birmingham and West Brom spurred him on. “I was 11, 12 years old but teams were saying I was too timid and not big enough,” Henry says. “It gave me more fire. You’ve got to learn from it. You can’t get too down. You’ve got to keep going. I think maybe the way I played, going into tackles, I was probably not as aggressive as I could have been. I learned as I got older to be more aggressive in certain situations. It was hard but I got through it.”

Henry, who has developed into one of the best left-backs in the Premier League, maintained a good perspective. He points out that his teammate Ethan Pinnock and the Leicester striker Jamie Vardy were late bloomers. Henry had time on his side. He joined Walsall and embraced playing at a lower level. “The right step,” he says. “You see a lot of youths go into top clubs and they can’t progress, they can’t get minutes. When I was 18 I was playing first-team football.”

Dean Smith managed Walsall and gave Henry a chance. “League One was really tough,” he says. “It was physical. I learned a lot. I was playing reserves before. Dean Smith came up to me after a game against West Brom and said: ‘Listen, go home,