Diss pair Matthew Upson and Declan Rudd get new lease of life away from home clubs

CELEBRATION TIME: Declan Rudd, pictured as an England under-16 player, has now played for every age group side

By Russell Claydon
Published on 08/02/2013 09:00

Matthew Upson and Declan Rudd are both hoping loan moves down the league ladder from their parent clubs can get them first-team football.

They may be at the opposite ends of their careers, but the former Diss High School pupils are hoping to benefit from playing football a long way from home.

Norwich City’s 22-year-old goalkeeper Rudd has made the 262-mile journey to Graham Westley’s League One Preston North End, while 33-year-old Stoke City defender Upson has travelled 218 miles to Gus Poyet’s Championship side Brighton and Hove Albion.

Rudd, who made his England Under-21s bow in a record-breaking game in Walsall on Tuesday, is back in East Anglia tomorrow looking to boost 17th-placed Preston’s survival hopes at 19th-placed Colchester United (3pm).

The former Diss Town youth keeper, picked up by Norwich scouts at the age of nine, said: “There is nothing better than playing for your country and it is a huge honour.”

The 4-0 win over Sweden ensured second-half substitute Rudd helped Stuart Pearce’s side enter the history books by recording seven straight wins, having not conceded a goal.

“I have now played at every age group, which is a big thing and I am happy to have done that and I will be looking to push on now and carry on achieving what I plan to achieve,” Rudd added when speaking to his new club, where he is looking to break into the starting line-up tomorrow after being an unused substitute in Saturday’s 2-1 home defeat to Shrewsbury.

Meanwhile, Eye-born former England international Upson, who didn’t hesitate to drop out of the Premier League after only one start in 2012/13, believes he can help Brighton win promotion.

“When you watch the Albion play they play some good football and that really interests me,” he told Brighton’s website. “We have got some fantastic talent and some good technical players and with the league position we are in, I think we can push for a play-off place and there is everything to play for in the last 17 games.”

Brighton host second-placed Hull City live on Sky Sports 2 tomorrow (5.20pm).

Sport

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Diss pair Matthew Upson and Declan Rudd get new lease of life away from home clubs

Top stories

Sport