Running into Jonny Evans in Belfast, you say, “Hello, how are you doing?” “Fit?” “Keeping well?” And then you ask him if he’s seen this footage you have on your phone.
Evans is too polite to point out the obvious, but of course he has seen it, probably a thousand times. It’s of him as a small boy, seven or eight, in a home video taken by his parents Dawn and Jackie when they lived on the Monkstown Road north of Evans’ native city in the mid-1990s.
Young Jonny is there holding up his Manchester United duvet; he is wearing his Manchester United kit; he has a model of Old Trafford; he has branded United curtains and “MUFC” stencilled onto the bedroom wall by his father.
As he re-looks at the passing images, Evans says: “I used to cry when United lost.”
The footage, compiled by BBC Northern Ireland and released when Evans re-joined United on September 1 after eight years away at West Bromwich Albion and Leicester City, shoots forward from Evans’ boyhood home to when his No 23 jersey hung in the United changing room — between those of Paul Scholes and Patrice Evra — and he was entering the Old Trafford pitch on the shoulder of Sir Alex Ferguson.
Evans smiles at it. Half an hour later, he is still talking about United.
He understands that millions of children across the world have similar bedroom memorabilia and dreams, but only a tiny fraction of one per cent make it to the professional game. Evans states and re-states his gratitude for his 17-year career, 500 senior club matches and 106 internationals.
Jonny Evans is back where it all began ⏪
Read more 👉 https://t.co/jA5zmi1v0P#BBCFootball pic.twitter.com/nG6acgefyS
— BBC SPORT NI (@BBCSPORTNI) September 1, 2023
As Manchester United’s official website detailed last Saturday, Evans’ return to the club has been a feelgood story in an otherwise turbulent beginning to the season on and off the pitch. “Evans Breaks Through the Cynicism”, was the title. He was described as “a proper Red” whose “composure and ability” was “underappreciated”.
It was hard to disagree — Evans speaks happily of West Brom and glowingly of Leicester but deep down in the 35-year-old is the boy in the bedroom. Asked how he felt when the offer to return was confirmed, he replies: “I was like a little kid again.
“In the back of my mind, I had a bit of nervousness as well. But I was coming home every day, laughing my head off, thinking, ‘Just make the most of the moment’.”
It is what Evans has done. He has started two Premier League games — at Burnley and home to Brentford — and United have won both. Although Paolo Maldini is always the Italian defender he has referenced, at Turf Moor, Evans channelled his inner Leonardo Bonucci when he hit a long pass to Bruno Fernandes to score the winner. He then came on in the League Cup against Crystal Palace and United won that; after, he missed the losses against Galatasaray and Palace in the league.
But Jonny Evans is no lucky charm, he is a serious player.
“I suppose for me the connection with Man United started quite young,” Evans says, “I was nine when I started going to the School of Excellence in Belfast, I was ten when I first went over on trial.
“Before that I was United-daft anyway. Roy Keane and Jaap Stam stood out to me. My dad, being a big United fan, loved Paul Ince, so there was a bit of a carry-over there for me. But in 1999, when I was 10,11 years old, it was Roy Keane.”
Evans’ boys club was Carnmoney Colts. There he was seen — in midfield — by United’s Belfast-based scout, Eddie Coulter. United’s history in the city is rich — George Best, Sammy McIlroy and Norman Whiteside help explain United’s enduring popularity and why Evans can say of going across the Irish Sea: “It felt natural in a way.
“But I knew the significance of it, of going over, because my dad had been across the water at Chelsea. I knew it could be close but so far away.
Evans’ dad was on the books of Chelsea
“That was bred into me, that it’s a really hard thing to become a professional footballer.
“My dad used to meet Norman Whiteside and travel up to the airport to go across and our whole family was Man United daft. We never had the means to go over and get tickets for a game, so the first time I was at Old Trafford was as a guest of the club.
“But I can remember when I was about eight I became a member of the Fred the Red supporters club. It was a birthday present. You got a little certificate and a mug and a teddy bear. You’d get Christmas cards from Fred the Red.”
Evans and Fred the Red are now colleagues once more (Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
Evans is smiling and laughing again — “I see Fred quite a bit now, so I should mention it!” — but this was not nostalgia for the sake of it and he detours into a recent encounter with Ferguson that illustrates once again Ferguson’s relentlessness in bringing through academy talent. The David Beckham documentary highlights this, but Beckham was far from the only teenager to receive the first-team dressing-room treatment.
“I spoke to Sir Alex about two weeks ago,” Evans says. “We were reminiscing about the first time I met him, which would have been 1998. We were staying in Castlefield and he came down to see all the young trialists, 20 or 30 of us, all different ages.
“And I remember being 14 or 15 and going into Man United’s dressing room after a game, meeting some of the players. Big Rio (Ferdinand) was there, Wes Brown.”
When he did sign, Evans played at various age-group levels and then in the Youth Cup, a trophy United take very seriously. “We lost,” he says, still a little mortified.
“We’d a good team — Gerard Pique, Ryan Shawcross, Darron Gibson, Giuseppe Rossi, myself, Danny Simpson — and we got knocked out by Stoke. I remember the manager — Ferguson — being absolutely livid.”
Evans was soon sent to Royal Antwerp — United had a relationship with the Belgian club from 1998 to 2013 — and when he came back to Manchester was sent on loan to Sunderland. At the Stadium of Light, Evans met Keane, who was about to soar in his first managerial role. Evans was 18 the week he joined and Sunderland were 10th in the Championship with 19 games left. Evans played in 18 of the 19, Sunderland lost once and won the division on the last day at Luton Town.
“I loved my time at Sunderland,” he says. “It was a chance to play and Roy Keane was the manager.”
United brought Evans back and Ferguson gave him his club debut at the start of that 2007-08 season in a League Cup tie at home to Coventry City. He was 19. United lost 2-0. After 56 minutes, he was replaced by Michael Carrick.
“Alex Ferguson played a young team that night. And we got bullied a bit by Coventry. I played one or two more games before they decided I’d go back out on loan and that’s when I had my second spell at Sunderland.”
The United games Evans featured in were both in the Champions League, at home to Dynamo Kyiv as a substitute for Pique and then 90 minutes at Roma with Carrick, Wayne Rooney and Darren Fletcher as team-mates and Francesco Totti in opposition.
“I got two Champions League games in, which wasn’t bad,” he says. “They went on to win the Champions League that season and I was in Moscow with my dad and brother Corry (who had also joined United at 16). We flew out together but it was so mad getting out of Russia we ended up on separate planes on the way back.”
Rooney and Evans celebrate in 2012 (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
When Evans returned to Old Trafford this time it was for seven straight seasons, during which United won three Premier League titles and lifted the League Cup twice. He played in Ferguson’s last game, the 5-5 draw at West Brom in May 2013, then under David Moyes and Louis van Gaal as United searched for stability in the absence of Ferguson’s certainty.
“In my last season under Ferguson, I felt comfortable, like I was playing well, an important part of a squad that went on to win the league,” Evans says. “Under David Moyes, the whole team took a hit. It became a really tough season.
“Van Gaal came in and tried to revamp the squad — players he wanted. Throughout that season with Van Gaal, I was never in a place of optimal fitness to be effective when I did play.
“Against Leicester (September 2014), I came off with a broken foot — it was Jamie Vardy, actually, who broke a bone. I missed six or seven weeks and when I did get back in we had a couple of positive results, a couple of clean sheets. I felt, ‘Great, I’m back in here’.
“Then there was an incident with Papiss Cisse at Newcastle and I ended up getting a ban (for spitting), an undeserved ban and that kept me out for about another two months because there was an international break in the middle of it.
“I just felt under David Moyes and Van Gaal I couldn’t get going and Van Gaal called me in and said, ‘Look, you can go’.”
It was May 2015, Evans was 27. His last United appearance had been as a replacement for Luke Shaw in a 2-1 win at Palace in the Premier League, with Marouane Fellaini scoring United’s winner. Evans had certainly seen variations of Manchester United.
“I was looking forward to a different challenge, experience something different. At the same time, I was gutted to be leaving Man United.
“But I never felt it was over — I was still living in Manchester, I knew everyone at the club. I never felt it was gone and it was something I was never going to see again. I’ll always be a supporter and all my friends, all my ex-team-mates live in the same area.
“When you have success together, you’ll always have that connection — people like Michael Carrick, Rio Ferdinand, Wes Brown, senior players who were unbelievable with all the young kids coming through. They looked after us. I still speak to Michael regularly. It’s great to see him doing so well in management.”
Evans joined West Brom for the remarkably low fee of £6million ($7.3m).
“I enjoyed it,” he says of his three seasons at The Hawthorns. “Having gone a year at United without playing that much, I really missed the buzz of playing. I went to West Brom and I felt wanted by the club, a key player. Tony Pulis relied on me and I loved the fact I was playing week in, week out.
“It was a real learning experience because going from a team who were top of the league to one where it was a battle for survival, it was a completely different mindset. I enjoyed the challenge of that.
“It was similar when I was at Man United and then you’d play for Northern Ireland. To have those two extremes, to flip between the mindsets, was challenging, but I’m so grateful I had those experiences.
“At West Brom, they constructed a good team and in the second season (2016-17) we were eighth and took only two points from the last nine games, still finished 10th. We were a good team and then I had an improving Northern Ireland alongside it.
“I felt… I still felt alive, I suppose. I was getting a lot from it, I was learning. It was a good thing for me.”
Manchester City (twice) and Arsenal (twice) thought so, enquiring about Evans’ availability. But when West Brom surprisingly slumped to relegation in 2018, Leicester stepped in.
“The ambition there,” he says, “it was really refreshing. They had amazing owners who wanted to back the team — at West Brom, it was never like that — it was about doing the best with what we’d got.
“But at Leicester, it was constantly pushing. They had the financial backing to do it, they gave the players everything they wanted, there was a closeness between owners and players. They were trying to elevate the club and obviously had the Premier League success.
“You could still feel that when they brought Brendan Rodgers in — it was a big statement. All the players took a breath and changed their mindset. He took us to a level where we felt we could win something and we did, the FA Cup (2021). It was a progressive club.”
A year later, Leicester finished eighth in the Premier League and reached the Europa Conference League semi-finals. Yet within 12 months, Leicester were relegated. Rodgers had gone and soon Evans, club captain, would leave, too.
Having played all 38 Premier League games in 2019-20, for example, Evans appeared in only 13 league games last season. As he says, “I’d a bad run of injuries and kept pushing myself to get back each time. With hindsight, I wish I’d taken the recovery a bit slower at the start. But I was captain of the club, so I was doing everything I could to force myself back.”
Did the captaincy create extra pressure to return?
“Not pressure, it creates an extra responsibility, but that’s a responsibility I wanted. I absolutely loved my time at Leicester, it was an incredible five years I had there. I loved it and there’s no doubt about it, Leicester will come back up.”
Evans was relegated with Leicester last season (Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
On last season’s final afternoon, Leicester had to beat West Ham at home and hope Everton would not do the same against Bournemouth. Leicester won, but so did Everton.
The day before, Evans had met Leicester’s director of football, Jon Rudkin. The conversation was brief, Evans was out of contract and there was no agreement on another.
“I understood it was a very difficult position, difficult to be talking about next season. Jon thanked me for my five years at the club. We just shook hands and hoped that everything would work out the next day.”
The next time Evans pulled on his boots, he was at United’s training ground, Carrington. He had spent a few weeks considering his future — before Northern Ireland’s game on Tuesday, he said he had contemplated retirement — and tried to summon the enthusiasm to go training on his own in a local park.
He couldn’t.
“So I rang Darren Fletcher (now United’s technical director). The reason I made the call was that I didn’t want to train on my own — I’m not very good at training on my own. I was saying to myself, ‘I can’t run up and down a park’. That was why I did it.”
Fletcher and United said Evans would be welcome to train with the reserves to maintain fitness while assessing his options.
“Players have done it over the years, but for them to allow me to do that was great and I was just grateful.”
How was the first morning driving in?
“It was great. There was a buzz, bumping into people who I hadn’t seen for a long time. It was great. It still is.
“But things progressed quite quickly and after about a week they intimated that I might want to go on tour and play a few games. ‘Would you like to?’.”
He had joked with his wife Helen, “That’s me now, I’m not leaving,” but was not expecting to be on United’s pre-season trip to the U.S. Now he was and once it was agreed, the club had to re-register Evans as a player and also as an employee on a short-term contract.
“Yes, 40 hours a week,” he laughs.
On the minimum wage?
“Yes.” He laughs again. The adult UK minimum wage is £10.42 an hour.
“I had to sign a month contract, to register. I had to sign on a small contract, to cover things (such as insurance and tax). It was a formality, they had to pay me something.”
Evans signs his United deal having initially signed on minimum wage so he could go on tour (Manchester United via Getty Images)
Evans has since signed a deal until next June. We can assume it is rather more than £10.42 an hour, but both parties can see its value.
“The role was that I’d come in as cover. They know I’m 35 and it’s a big challenge at Man United, the number of games, the travelling, physically it’s demanding. Nowadays you need big squads.
“It was a decision I had to weigh up. I knew I’d not be playing all the time, and at the end of your career, you crave regular football. Man United was the only club I’d give that up for.
“I’m absolutely loving it. I love it every day. In one way it feels quite surreal, in another way it’s quite normal.”
Manchester United fans will understand that view. Jonny Evans has been clothed by their club for the majority of his 35 years. They knew his Red yesterdays, now he has Red tomorrows.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
