The boy himself:
"This is a great feeling for me. I want to play for my country. I came into the squad because someone dropped out and words cannot express how I feel right now.
"My dad had always said to me 'you could get on this tour' but this has been a dream for me. Things have happened so quickly for me and hopefully they can carry on.
"I owe a lot to Bryan Robson at West Brom for taking a gamble on me when he signed me in January and that spell of playing regularly in the Premiership filled me with so much confidence.
"Since I've joined up with England everyone has helped me to feel at home and I'm so pleased that I was able to make the most of my opportunity.
"Hopefully I can go back to Manchester United and win the Premiership next season. I want to sign a new contract and Sir Alex is chatting to my dad at the moment. But the main thing for me is to play football."
And from The Sunday Times:
His first goal in particular, a deliberately aimed and curled free kick with his left foot from the right edge of the American penalty area was exquisite. He has done it before, and Kasey Keller, the goalkeeper yesterday, would surely have known it because Richardson’s victim just before the end of the English season had been Keller’s countryman Brad Friedel, while Richardson was completing his loan with West Bromwich Albion and Friedel was sustaining the meanest of form for Blackburn Rovers.
Let us replay in our minds the technique, the timing, and the apparent languid approach with which Richardson struck that goal after three minutes and 40 seconds in an England shirt. It was Boys Own comic material delivered with the quality, dare we say, of a Beckham. He leaned into the shot, he had his eye fixed on the near top corner, and evidently he saw that Keller was positioned with his bodyweight over his right foot, the opposite end to where the shot was placed. By the time Keller, on his 79th appearance for the United States, realised his positional error, the ball was floating in a precise arc over his defensive wall and over his outstretched hands.
Classic, and such a pleasing start for a slender young man whose face, while he is playing, radiates a boyish joy at being in the game. He is an apprentice at Old Trafford, and obviously with Cristiano Ronaldo and Ryan Giggs, the apprenticeship may be insufferably long. Bryan Robson knows this, as a former insider at Manchester United should, and persuaded his old mentor Sir Alex Ferguson that it would be good for United, and even better for West Brom, if the learner could be given a four-month sabbatical from Manchester’s reserves to help West Brom stay in the Premiership.
So it proved, and in the process Richardson, already an England Under 16 captain and an Under 21 cap, had caught the eye of Sven Goran Eriksson. Even so promotion to the England squad required several lucky breaks; first Shaun Wright-Phillips was pulled out of this end-of-season tour to America, and then Stewart Downing, the Middlesbrough left-winger coveted by Eriksson, injured a knee as soon as the tour began. Richardson from a stand-by position, had bought a first-class ticket of opportunity.
We have known for some time what an opportunist mind Richardson possesses. At 14, and born in the London Borough of Greenwich, he was a pupil of the West Ham Youth Academy. Manchester United "stole him" from there, persuaded his parents that he would thrive under United coaching and an early life in digs, and won the bitter argument to acquire, more cheaply and considerably earlier than other clubs customarily do, one of West Ham’s fledglings.
He is an artist, on the field, and apparently off it. He likes to draw, which is better for his health and for the country’s prospect than the prevalent spare-time habits of so many players who believe that they have made it with their first big signing.
Sir Alex had told him, as no doubt he tells all the boys, that if he was good enough he would get his chance. It came at West Brom, the artist helped draw the Albion miraculously away from relegation, and here he was in Soldier Field. He doubled his opportunism a minute before half time.
Joe Cole, like him a Hammer who had flown, created the opening with a dynamic run and a deliberate pass, but Richardson, quicker than Andrew Johnson, cut into the penalty box and with his right foot from 15 yards was quicker to the ball than the American Steve Cherundolo.
Technique, a bright and evidently cheerful mind, a player in love with the game. He was limping before Eriksson took him off on the hour. But he had taken two out of the three chances on his full international debut. "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Sounds like one of those quotations that Americans claim, and certainly many of them have pinned this one on the locker room wall. In fact it was written by Seneca, a Roman philosopher who, like the US defence , could not have seen Richardson coming.