Jonathan Rowe interview: Rabiot regrets, scoring bangers for Bologna — and being in awe of PSG (as an Arsenal fan)

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The dust is beginning to settle. Arsenal, the team Jonathan Rowe grew up supporting, are back in the final after 20 years. “Obviously I want them to win,” he says. They have never been champions of Europe before. As a football lover more generally, however, Rowe wants the game against Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest to be a show. “I want to see a great performance from PSG because those players, that front three — Desire Doue, Ousmane Dembele and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia — all of them are just…” Momentarily lost for words, Rowe recovers himself. “The decision-making is second to none.” For a young winger making his way in the game, PSG-Bayern was sensory overload. “I was in awe,” Rowe says. “I was thinking that’s where I want to be; which ever wing you switch it to, whoever has the ball… you know they can create something out of nothing.” An analyst who works with the former England Under-21 international is like a waiter with a restaurant regular. He knows exactly what Rowe likes. “I wouldn’t say I have a favourite but obviously Kvaratskhelia,” Rowe says. “He plays on the left like I do most of the time. I’m always asking him to send clips from Kvara. The little shift and cut inside and whip it far post. I try to implement that into my game.” He tried it against Aston Villa in the Europa League quarter-finals and it came off. Rowe’s problem — and as far as problems go it’s a nice one to have — is he only scores bangers for Bologna. “Scored quite a few decent ones, haven’t I?” he laughs. The 23-year-old has reserved some of his best performances for Europe this season. In the round before the Villa tie, Rowe helped decide an all-Italian affair against Roma. His powerful shot from outside the box ignited one of the games of the year, a seven-goal thriller, which Bologna won 4-3 in extra-time. “When the stakes are high and there’s pressure, I’m someone who really likes to perform and try to be the difference,” Rowe says. Bologna signed him late last summer for €17million (£14.8m). The fee was one of the biggest paid under the ownership of Joey Saputo, surpassed only by the deals done for Joshua Zirkzee and Riccardo Calafiori. The boots left by Dan Ndoye when he moved to Nottingham Forest were big to fill. The winger Rowe replaced scored the only goal in last year’s Coppa Italia final, ending a 51-year wait for the trophy. “I feel like I’ve settled in now,” Rowe says. “I feel comfortable. It’s not even been a year yet but I’ve started to find my feet.” A lot was made of the circumstances of Rowe’s sudden transfer from Marseille. After a 1-0 defeat by Rennes on the opening weekend of the season, a fight broke out in the away dressing room. Rowe and goalkeeper Geronimo Rulli were having an argument. “It got heated,” Rowe says. “It was something he said.” Security tried to break them up. One of the senior players, Adrien Rabiot, then intervened, and, as it escalated, Darryl Bakola fainted. Roberto De Zerbi, Marseille’s coach at the time, likened it to “two employees punching each other, as if they were in an English pub”. As Rowe tells the story, there is genuine regret in his voice. It has followed him around and he doesn’t want to be defined by it. “The thing is,” he says. “De Zerbi and Mehdi (Benatia), the (sporting) director, did not see the first punch (Rabiot) threw right at the start. They only saw me come back and hit him. So they probably thought I just hit him out of nowhere. I kind of had to explain it after. “Emotions were flaring. Things got out of control. These things happen a lot in changing rooms, more than people probably realise.” Marseille president Pablo Longoria said in August it was “an incident of extreme seriousness and violence, something unheard of” in an interview with AFP. “We had to take a decision after an incident that went beyond what is acceptable in a football club, as in any organisation.” Romuald Palao, Rabiot’s lawyer, disputed those claims last summer and accused Marseille of using it as an excuse to force him out of the club. In the week we spoke Real Madrid fined Federico Valverde and Aurelien Tchouameni €500,000 (£432,000) following a bust-up at the club’s training ground in Valdebebas. Valverde was even taken to hospital for a scan, which showed he suffered a head injury bad enough to rule him out of El Clasico. It was the latest in a series of incidents at Real Madrid, and supports Rowe’s point. Marseille sold Rowe and Rabiot to Serie A and, as fate would have it, their debuts came against each other when Bologna travelled to San Siro to play Milan in mid-September  — with the France international admitting he had quickly moved on from the incident. De Zerbi was reluctant to let both players go. In Italy, the pair’s development is credited to De Zerbi. Even Rabiot, now 31, has kicked on since his time at Juventus. Rowe has been involved in 12 goals, his latest strike a stoppage-time winner against Napoli, the perfect improvised scissor kick. “With De Zerbi I realised you have got to pay more attention to the details,” Rowe says. “From your first touch to the next pass, to when the ball is on the other side of the pitch. It’s like when you’re driving. You have got to be three steps ahead just in case something happens and you have to be ready to make an intelligent decision.” Everything De Zerbi did in training had a purpose to it, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious. “Sometimes in training I could get a bit bored because of the build-up that we’d be doing would mainly be focused on the defences and the midfielders in order to get the ball to us attackers. “You’d be standing around in the hot sun for a few hours. But in a way that trains your brain to stay focused no matter what’s going on in the game. You might see the ball once every 10 or 15 minutes but when you get that ball you have to be decisive or you have to make something happen and create.” Vincenzo Italiano, his new coach at Bologna, has not resorted to the same techniques De Zerbi deployed at Marseille to bring the team together. Bologna are a tight, settled unit. Marseille, by contrast, were always churning players over and needed to forge greater collective spirit. After a 3-1 defeat by Reims last March, De Zerbi organised a training camp in Rome with a series of team-building activities. “I’d never done this before. I didn’t even know this was allowed in football,” Rowe says. “We went into the middle of nowhere, in the woods, in the cold. We’d wake up at 4am. We’d go to do some run or we’d walk into the woods. Then we’d do push-ups, a little core circuit with the flashlights out in the pitch black then another walk. Then we’d do hill sprints. You know, the fireworks, the pyro; whatever you call it that the fans use in the stadiums. He’d rip one of them open and start walking like we’re Vikings.” Bologna has been less melodramatic. When the opportunity presented itself, Rowe thought Italiano’s style of play was a good fit. Along with Como, Sassuolo and Lazio, Bologna form part of a tactical minority in Serie A. They play 4-3-3 with proper wingers rather than the orthodox 3-5-2 with wing-backs. “It suits my game play,” Rowe says. “When it’s right, when it pays off; winning the ball high up the field, pressing, counter-attacking, being direct. I feel that sums up my game. When it pays off and the rest of the team is on the same wavelength, it almost feels unstoppable.” Rowe didn’t hit the ground running. He needed time to adjust. He joined when the season was underway. He didn’t speak the language. “It was a bit of big shift from Marseille with De Zerbi; keeping possession and trying to find an opening, the little gap between the pockets. It was a change of mindset, because when I came I was trying probably to link up with the players, doing short passes. They were playing long. And I was like: ‘What are you doing?’ They were like: ‘This is how we play?’ It was a bit weird. “But as time goes on naturally you build those connections, you build more relationships with team-mates. You start to understand their strengths and they start to understand yours a lot more. You have to adapt and I’m pretty good at that.” Serie A needs risk-averse dribblers like Rowe. It can’t keep turning wingers into wing-backs or forcing them to play as strikers. See the recent travails of Christian Pulisic and Rafa Leao at Milan. Even so, breaking down low blocks and three-man defences is hard. “Once you beat one person and the next one, then you beat the next one and another one’s there,” Rowe says. “It’s quite difficult to get space to shoot.” He has followed the path taken by Jude Bellingham, Jamie Gittens and Jadon Sancho in going abroad early in order to progress his career. “Obviously my goal in the future is to play in the Premier League week in, week out for one of the top teams. “At the time when I was at Norwich, I got injured so I couldn’t kick on from the great start I had so that probably stopped my chances of going to one of the big big teams and so I thought: ‘You know what? If this is my goal, I don’t mind taking a step around to get to the final goal’. I’m just taking it day by day, assessing my sessions and continuously improving in the hope it’ll pay off one day down the line.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms