When Saturday afternoons came around, Tom Carroll had to get out of the house.
The midfielder had taken time away from competitive football and despite ‘getting his buzz back’ by training with Tottenham’s under-21s, kids a decade younger than him, the thrill of a matchday was still missing.
Sitting down to watch the updates from dozens of Premier League and EFL games across the land coming in on Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday and hearing mention of his former clubs and players who were his peers was particularly painful.
Advertisement
“That’s what did it for my head,” says Carroll. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this for another year’. I’ve got two young boys and I wanted them to see me actually play instead of me saying, ‘I’m going to training’ (during the week) and then just being at home on the Saturday.”
At that point, Carroll’s career had, in a way, gone full circle. He was back training at Spurs, the club where he had broken through alongside the likes of Harry Kane and Ryan Mason. But persistent hip injuries blighted a career that had promised so much.
He received offers from clubs in the Championship, the second tier of English football, and League One, its third, and Tottenham even asked if he was open to a player/coach role, such was his impact around the place.
But Carroll was not done yet.
Despite taking a year out for that 2022-23 season, Carroll has just completed the most productive campaign of his career at the age of 32.
This is how Carroll reset his career, thanks to Spurs, a flywheel and a new lease of life in Exeter.
Playing darts in front of thousands against two professional rugby players dressed as characters from The Incredibles probably wasn’t on Carroll’s to-do list this time last year.
The Exeter City midfielder, along with team-mate Pierce Sweeney, took on players from Exeter Chiefs, the city’s top-tier rugby club, from the oche ahead of the PDC Premier League darts tour’s event in Exeter back in February.
Similarly, playing more than 40 games last season may have seemed far-fetched for Carroll, considering he had sat out the entirety of the prior one on his own accord. But that he did, marshalling the midfield for Gary Caldwell’s League One side, who ended the 2023-24 campaign among the form teams in the top four divisions of the domestic pyramid.
The cultured midfielder emerged from Tottenham’s academy and made his debut under then manager Harry Redknapp in an August 2011 Europa League qualifier against Scottish side Hearts. Carroll only made 56 appearances for the north Londoners in seven years, however, with his time in their senior ranks being punctuated by injuries and loans to Leyton Orient, Derby County, Queens Park Rangers and Swansea City.
He eventually joined the latter permanently in January 2017, and played more than 100 games for them over a three-year period, the majority in the Premier League.
A persistent hip issue hampered a promising career, first cropping up at Swansea in 2018, then while on loan to Aston Villa the following year and again in 2021-22, when he was with Ipswich Town. It was after the latter campaign that Carroll decided to temporarily step away from the game.
Advertisement
“I had a couple of niggles the previous year when I was at Ipswich and when my contract expired I wasn’t in any real rush (to get back),” Carroll says. “I had offers to go places, but nothing that I particularly fancied doing. Don’t get me wrong, I’d have loved to have played and if the right thing had come up, I’d 100 per cent have done it, but at the same time, it’s probably worked out well. I’ve been able to refresh the body.”
As it turned out, Carroll returned to his boyhood club and spent the 2022-23 season training with Tottenham Under-21s. Despite not playing competitively for all that time, it helped him fall back in love with football.
“They were good with me,” he says. “I was training on the best pitches, the best facilities. I know matches are completely different to training at times but it made me think, ‘I can still do this’. It was a great place to go to every day and train with the top young players in the country.”
Carroll cites midfielder Alfie Devine (who had loan spells at Port Vale of League One and Plymouth Argyle in the Championship last season), forward Jamie Donley and winger Yago Santiago — “He really impressed me, a special talent, really good one-v-one” — as the cream of that particular crop.
GO DEEPER
Alfie Devine and Ashley Phillips: Spurs duo already showing promise at Plymouth
For Carroll, his priority was to get fit and then remain healthy, putting those previous issues behind him. At Spurs, he not only benefited from the use of their state-of-the-art training facilities, but also being immersed in top-level professionalism again.
“Everything is done properly,” he says. “At some clubs at first-team level, they sometimes skipped ‘prehab’ and the (body) activation stuff before training; perhaps it was seen as not as important. But last year it was almost me being stripped back to being a youth-team player, being in the gym at this time, in there for half an hour, doing different stuff in circuits; there were different exercises I picked up that I felt really helped me.”
Advertisement
The secret weapon? A flywheel. Training on this device sees the resistance generated by the inertia of the apparatus, as opposed to gravity in the case of traditional weight training.
“You can do different stuff on it, but to help with my hips, my glutes, hamstrings — it’s been brilliant for me,” Carroll says. “It got me through that year without feeling anything.”
Carroll received several offers during that season, with clubs keen to sign an experienced midfielder who had played in the top flight and for England Under-21s. Many came from League One.
Meanwhile, Spurs were so impressed with the impact he was having in training that he was informally asked whether he might consider taking the “Huddlestone role” — that of an over-age player and coach embedded with the under-23s side; a position the former Spurs and England midfielder Tom Huddlestone, now 37, held at Manchester United until last month — but he wasn’t ready to effectively retire from senior football.
He trained with financial-stricken Reading towards the end of a campaign that ultimately ended in their relegation from the Championship, but decided against signing for them permanently.
By last summer, Carroll hadn’t played in a competitive fixture for a year when he got a call from Exeter manager Caldwell, who sold him a project at the League One club, one that included a recently-refurbished training ground, and spoke of his ambition to play high-energy, possession football. Carroll was impressed. He impressed Caldwell, too, and in the July signed a one-year contract to play for Exeter.
“The style of play was massive because it’s a league where not loads of teams play the way I’d like to see the game be played,” Carroll says. “I spoke to the manager and decided to come down here (Exeter is in Devon, in the south-west of England — a four-hour drive from London). I think they wanted to see if I was fit, and I wanted to see what it was like down here, and it just clicked straight away.
“Having a new training ground is another big plus for that as well. You go to some clubs (at League One level) and you’re still in portacabins. So that was another big factor.”
GO DEEPER
Behind the scenes with Exeter City, the best away team in 2024 in England's top four divisions
Carroll’s first competitive game since April 2022 (for Ipswich against Cambridge United, also in League One, 490 days earlier) couldn’t have gone any better. Exeter raced out of the blocks on the opening day of last season away at Wycombe Wanderers, scoring twice in the opening four minutes and eventually winning 3-0. For Carroll, who played 72 minutes, the buzz was back.
Advertisement
“After the game, I was like, ‘I’ve missed this feeling’. Winning games, you can’t really replicate it. It’s just a buzz with the boys after, going over to clap the fans. I think that’s special. After that game, it made me realise, ‘I can still do this. I still feel good’. So I just wanted to enjoy it and get that buzz back.”
In the middle of September, Exeter were top of the table and later that month they knocked Luton Town of the Premier League out of the Carabao Cup on the way to reaching the last 16.
“Then came the dip,” Carroll says.
Exeter went on a 13-game winless run in the league, with 10 defeats including a 7-0 demolition away against Bolton Wanderers, and on Christmas Day they were a point above the relegation places.
“I’ve never been in anything like it in my life,” Carroll says. “We could be playing really well in games, and we’d lose one or two-nil. And you’d be like, ‘How’s your luck? What’s going on here?’.
“But the best thing about it was that we all stuck together. No one turned on management, which can happen at other clubs when they don’t win. It was clear that we hadn’t lost faith and that the manager hadn’t lost the dressing room. Everyone was like, ‘We’re fully with you. We just need to improve, work a lot harder, keep going; keep doing what we’re doing on the training pitch and something will change’. And when it did, it clicked. It was brilliant after that.”
The upturn in form started with a Boxing Day (December 26) win in the reverse fixture against Wycombe. What followed was a remarkable run where Exeter took 42 points from their last 25 league games to surpass their 2022-23 season points total (61, compared to 56) and final position (13th, compared to 14th).
It feels like yesterday that Carroll was breaking through at Spurs as a fresh-faced teenager, but now he is an elder statesman in the dressing room — a position he is relishing.
Advertisement
Exeter have offered him a new contract. He has enjoyed his time in Devon but it has meant living away from his wife and children, who are based in Hertfordshire, just north of London, so it’s a decision he is mulling over.
“Having a year out has made me realise that I should try to enjoy it,” Carroll says.
“In football, everything goes so quickly that you can get caught up in it. You win a game, you feel great for maybe that evening, and then it’s on to the next one. But I wanted to come back in and try and enjoy it as much as I can, and I’ve done that. We have got a pretty good squad now, so it’s just about building on that.”
(Top photo: Pete Norton/Getty Images)