Farewell, Sam Hutchinson

Tom reflects on a departing veteran whose Reading career started off promisingly, but went south in his second season.

I always quite liked Sam Hutchinson personally.

Of course, there is that interview from Shrewsbury Town away, however.

Without making him sound like an attention-seeking news presenter on a controversial TV channel, I think he said what was on many fans’ lips and what many other senior figures in the club were likely hesitant to say. Hutchinson wasn’t wrong to say the team was “young, inexperienced and getting punished week in, week out”, but also conveying multiple times that no player gave anything less than 100% effort.

However, that doesn’t mean it was right at that time. Imagine being an 18-year-old Tyler Bindon starting practically every game in his debut season in senior football and hearing that from a man a generation older than him - who’s supposed to be a pillar of support in the changing room. It can only have compounded the misery of the defeat.

It’s been a very strange career for Hutchinson, and there have been a fair few signs in his past to show that this debacle could have been a long time coming.

He joined the Chelsea academy aged seven, and the injuries began well into his youth, beginning to see knee-injury specialists at 10. At 17, he appeared for the Blues’ senior team for the first time, but a chondral defect forced Hutchinson to retire at 21.

“It wasn’t a big call at the time because I hated it,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “I just wanted to stop the pain and stop everything. I never wanted to come back. I didn’t want to play for Chelsea either because I blamed them for it, even though it wasn’t, it was just what happened.”

In an interview with the EFL, Hutchinson added: “My knee was bad, but the depression made me give up.”

Photo by Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images

He then spent 18 months out of the game, including time at The Priory rehabilitation centre for professional mental health treatment. “My wife worked part-time at the time. She’d come home in the afternoon to find me on the sofa under a blanket watching Homes Under The Hammer. I had nothing else to do and I didn’t want to do anything else,” said Hutchinson.

He returned to Chelsea in December 2011 after encouragement from teammates, and short-lived loans to Nottingham Forest, Vitesse Arnhem and Sheffield Wednesday followed. He joined the Owls permanently in 2014, making nearly 200 appearances in all competitions over two spells, which sandwiched a spell in Cyprus for Pafos.

It was towards the end of his spell in South Yorkshire that things began to turn sour though. Hutchinson failed to make an appearance from January 24, 2020 until the end of the season, and although then-manager Garry Monk didn’t give a huge amount away on the circumstances of Hutchinson’s exiling, he eventually cited the reason as a chequered availability record and a lack of continuity and reliability.

Hutchinson himself was a little more upfront, revealing that he knew he was done at Wednesday under Monk since leaving the first-team picture, but also saying: “I can categorically say I’ve never been disruptive in that dressing room.”

The midfielder hinted at his desire to find a club down south to be closer to family, and that he did, putting pen to paper in Reading after a successful trial period under Paul Ince. After making several pre-season appearances, and a few at the start of our Championship campaign, he turned out for the Stoke City home match in September with a new-look short hairstyle. This happened multiple times before at previous clubs in his career too.

This may seem like the world’s most insignificant fact, except Hutchinson said previously that, for him, shaving his head is a way to signify to himself a new start after a period of depression in his life.

Despite managing just 26 appearances across his Reading career, he received 10 yellow cards, which continued the infamous “Hutchinson bingo” quips on Twitter, with Royals fans taking up the gauntlet from the Sheffield Wednesday faithful who started the joke.

However, that too could have been a sign of his mental health at the time. “When I’m in a depressed state I’ll get loads of bookings and sending-offs”, he said. “I only ever get depressed over football.”

Saying he likes to get stuck in is an understatement. But you can’t deny his talent. For an older player he was incredibly mobile and got about a lot. In the 2022/23 season, if he hadn’t been injured so much, I’d expect most fans to pick him every game. In fact, he got the joint-second-highest average in TTE’s player ratings that year.

In 2023/24 however he fell to rock bottom of the pack, getting the lowest average in the team, unsurprisingly. It didn’t always look like a foregone conclusion with Hutchinson though, since Ruben Selles opted for him often over the likes of Michael Craig, Tivonge Rushesha and Ben Elliott in midfield before he played his final league game for Reading at Shrewsbury.

When speaking to Reading Today in preseason about Selles, Hutchinson had a glowing review of the Spaniard, saying: “He wants to win, he wants to drive people forward. If everyone listens to him and gets on the same page, we can do that.” Ironic, considering he was the one to rip those very pages out of the book and throw them out of the window a few months later.

Hutchinson undoubtedly had the best intentions of the club and its players at heart. That interview after the Shrewsbury game was rash and quite impulsive, but I’d bet many Reading fans on their way home from Shropshire said things along the same lines, and in no uncertain terms either.

For me, there’s more to Hutchinson than meets the eye, and researching his past for this piece has definitely opened my eyes to the life of a struggling footballer. He won’t be too badly missed in RG2, but will be remembered for sure.

I’ll end with a quote from Hutchinson himself, where he talks about his aggressive nature on the pitch, but perhaps a little bit off the pitch too, as he hints at.

“I won’t ever calm down. It’s not my character... I’m not like it off the pitch. Well, sometimes I am but not to get myself into any trouble. That’s how I have made a career in the game thus far and I’m not going to change.”

Thank you and farewell, Sam.