Bolton Wanderers player had England credentials – he was ahead of his time but had to retire at 29 | OneFootball

Injury prone Mark Davies could have been a star if not for persistent fitness issues that prevented his potential being fulfilled.

Every supporter of every club has that one player who ‘would have played for England if not for…’ and then you can insert any reason you wish as to why that player didn’t fulfil their potential.

However, Mark Davies genuinely would have played for England if not only for the fact he was one of the most injury-prone players to put on the Bolton Wanderers shirt, but also due to his career coming just on the cusp of when English football in the top-flight would value him most.

The Willenhall-born Wolverhampton Wanderers academy graduate should have, and perhaps even still was, an absolute gem of a signing when then-Premiership stalwarts Bolton signed him to a four-and-a-half-year deal in the winter transfer window of 2009 for an undisclosed fee from Wolves.

When he joined, he had just spent a couple of months out on loan at Leicester City down in League One, but he made the step-up to the top-flight almost instantly and the signs from the very start were there that Bolton had themselves a real player.

Things don’t always go to plan or how they should do, though.

The Bolton Iniesta

As Gary Madine once said, ‘Mark Davies is like another Iniesta’.

Despite officially being 5'11", the crafty maverick midfielder played with a low centre of gravity that would see him compared to that of one of the greatest footballers of all time, Andrés Iniesta.

The balance he would show on the ball made him stand out whenever he was on the pitch, and he was a player that, at his best or at his fittest, could run games and run through genuinely excellent teams – as he often showed, perhaps most famously in a 3-1 defeat of Liverpool at the Reebok Stadium in January 2012.

Davies’ ability to dribble with the ball and play a passing style of football not necessarily akin to that of the manager who signed him, Gary Megson, was not limited to just being easy on the eye, as he could often do the thunderous elements of a midfield game, whether that be putting a strong tackle in or taking aim and striking home from distance.

However, that is perhaps where things should have been managed differently and would have been managed differently if he had come through about a decade or so later.

Rather than being boxed into the category of an all-action midfielder, which may well have led to his persistent and relentlessly frustrating injury issues that saw him having to retire at the age of 29, he would have been allowed to have been eased into first-team football and then flourished in a more tactically specific style and system.

Mark Davies’ unfortunate career arc

Given his first-team debut at the age of just 17 by Glenn Hoddle whilst at Wolves, Davies began to establish himself properly into the first-team in the 2005/06 campaign before then suffering the first of a litany of serious injuries in the summer of 2006.

As he began to regain fitness ahead of the 2007/08 season, he suffered yet another significant injury with a shoulder issue that was followed by several niggles that saw him miss the entirety of the campaign.

Having suffered through so many injuries already, in order to regain his fitness, he went out on loan to Leicester in November 2008, where he shone in just seven League One appearances for the Foxes before Wanderers purchased him.

Despite having leaped from the third-tier to the top-flight, Davies immediately slotted into a struggling Bolton side and, on his home debut, produced an excellent performance that consisted of an assist for a Sebastian Puygrenier header, as Wanderers defeated Tottenham Hotspur by three goals to two at the Reebok Stadium.

When fully fit, Davies would start and be instrumental to Bolton for most of the next decade. When he was fully fit was so exceedingly rare, though, that when a season-ending injury occurred just five games into the 2016/17 season, a season where Davies had started so well as Wanderers sought automatic promotion back to the Championship, it would be his last game as a professional footballer, and he has now gone on to work in property development.

This was a creative, dribbling spark in midfield, capped at England at U16, U17 and U19 level that debuted and became a key man at a big club in Wolves at 17 before making the leap immediately from League One to the Premiership at just 20. The signs were there for him to become an England player for a very long time.

Persistently linked with Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool and the subject of a £5 million bid from Swansea City in the summer of 2012, his former teammate Robbie Blake, after describing him as the most talented player he has ever played with, also claimed he was Chelsea-bound to join José Mourinho’s Blues in the Portuguese’ second stint in charge but yet another injury prevented the move.

Perhaps those injuries could have been avoided if he had been allowed to flourish in a better environment in terms of a focused creative role on the pitch and with a better understanding of a young player’s development and, if so, he would have been destined for so much more than retirement at 29.