I think you're both right. Rice comes across as a fairly normal bloke (for a great footballer) who's also the type of heads-up, play-reading, hard-working operator off the field he is on it, a bloke who intuitively works and leads respectfully and with popularity in a group of similar blokes.
But then Rice also comes across as a bloke with clever and professional people around him who know his talent and image are worth a fortune exactly because (white) English fans and pundits recognise him as what he is: the modern TikTok-ready template for the genealogy of likeable and superficially virtuous Bobby Moore, Bobby Robson, Frank Lampard type of (white) English captain and midfield general who's also an excellent footballer.
I don't bring up the aspect of race except as far as a white man as England's hero remains the popular template and that's just a fact of contemporary England, reinforced in countless movies like DUNKIRK or 1917 that replay the historical fantasies of Brexit that look like returning parasites like Nigel Farage to influence in an England that is naturally Declan Rice's England and will continue to be after those fantasies fuck England up all over again.
If you used AI to graft Rice into George Mackay's role in 1917 or Cillian Murphy's in DUNKIRK neither film would miss a beat. Rice gets blown up for Arsenal as his day job, he'll spend the summer in the trenches for the homeland, and then he'll spend his holidays at home with his family. If there were an Excalibur at Colney Rice would've pulled it out of the stone the day he signed for us.
Rice's Anglo-Irishness is not the kind that's ever going to wage a poppy protest. Rice's normal white Englishness doesn't stop him being expert at singing along with UK drill, or wearing couture, or knowing how to order at a neo-Nordic restaurant, or having a wholesome private life with his anti-WAG teenage sweetheart.
Rice comes across as the Übermensch, a bloke whose talent, spirits and nature correspond almost exactly to success and power in the world in which he has come to move and act: warts, media circus, public relations consultants, impossible playing schedule and all. He declares confidently in an interview "wait until Arteta wins it" and then Arteta wins it with Rice leading the troops. Rice does a cross-London move and most Hammers fans say ruefully "good on you Declan" as they get relegated.
The "it's not done" meme sums it up for now. Rice is the anti-Gerrard, the man whose money is somehow always in the same place as his mouth, the man who's everywhere in the action without it feeling like he's taking up too much space, and actually no one would mind if he took up even more space. So much so that Rice is winning us the league making these self-absorbed gestures at the same time as his gestures manage to absorb the whole world, like the gestures of heroic everyman resolve from the breaks between brutal rounds of the final fight of some poorly made, but affecting and wildly commercially successful sequel to ROCKY.
I hadn't put a finger on why I'm a bit bemused by Rice till now but I think that's roughly it. Wonder how long it'll last.
