INTERVIEW: JONATHAN WALTERSThe Stoke forward tells EMMET MALONEthat his role at club level is different to what's expected of him for Ireland – either way he's happy to dig in

THERE ARE lines of work in this world in which you live and die by your numbers and there are those who would contend that football should be one of them. Jonathan Walters, though, would appear to present a pretty strong case to the contrary with the Stoke City striker set to head for the Euros off a season that, on the face of it, yielded a pretty modest return – 10 goals from more than 50 games.

Not for nothing, though, has the 28-year-old become a key player for Tony Pulis and emerged as a potentially major one for Giovanni Trapattoni and Ireland.

Walters’s form at Stoke has, by all accounts, ensured he is virtually the first name on Pulis’s teamsheet and he is certainly the player consistently selected by a manager who prizes his workrate and versatility and willingness to dig in and fight for the cause. Characteristics that are, perhaps above anything else, the basis for City’s success over the past couple of seasons.

When Walters received the Stanley Matthews Award as the club’s outstanding player earlier this season the forums were suddenly filled with messages from fans who could not square the recognition of the player with his return rate. On a trip home this week to promote the launch of Adidas’ new Predator boot, though, Walters, without any sense of arrogance, suggests they just might be missing something.

“I don’t read the forums but yeah, you’re classed as a striker and you don’t get many goals but I do drop quite a lot, very deep. I play a lot more alongside Glenn and Dean where they’re playing.

“In the past few games I’ve been playing as a central midfielder believe it or not, at the start of the game, not even as a striker, I’ve been told to play in the centre of midfield. You still try and break forward and ahead of Peter and people look at you in those games making runs and they say ‘oh he’s playing up front, he should be getting the goals’ but I know what I do and the manager knows what I do.”

He has, he admits his share of goalscoring opportunities this season, but then he has made a few too and it is that selflessness in the support role that goes a long way towards explaining his appeal to managers.

For Trapattoni, he is more of a frontman, with the Italian suggesting that he sees the much travelled player as an alternative to Kevin Doyle or Shane Long, but at the Britannia he plays around one of the biggest strikers of the lot and Walters maintains that he is happy to slot into whatever role is reserved for him, especially if it means seeing some action in Poland.

“It is different. It’s new. It’s back to what I used to do more than anything. But each role and each game, it depends who you are playing with, brings you different experiences really. If you’re playing against a team with a three-man midfield with a dangerman getting the ball and spraying around and I might be the one to just sit on him and stay on him the whole game. Whatever job I’m asked to do, I try to do it to the best of my ability.”

It’s an attitude you can easily imagine wooing the Ireland boss and Walters’s performances in a green shirt turned him into a serious contender to play in Poland, particularly if Trapattoni is serious about shuffling his pack against the Spanish.

His strike-rate is unlikely to look any better if he does get the nod to play the world and European champions but Walters’s workrate is certainly unlikely to prompt too much criticism from Irish fans afterwards.