GettyImagesJem Karacan: Deserved call up by Turkey

This week Royals supporters were delighted to hear that another of their young starlets has come of age with an international call up, as midfielder Jem Karacan has been named by Turkey for their World Cup qualifying match against Hungary in Budapest on Tuesday. This is a natural progression, for the Londoner, who qualifies for Turkey by virtue of his Turkish-Cypriot father, since Jem had previously played for the nation at several youth levels, and has captained the Under-21 team, but his international career seemed to have gone cold.

He joins a number of other Royals away on international duty this week, including three players in the Wales squad which triumphed over Scotland at the weekend - Chris Gunter, Simon Church and Hal Robson-Kanu. Interestingly, none of these three are regular starters for Reading despite being habitually called up for Wales.

Karacan, though, is now a regular starter for Reading, returning to the team almost as soon as he'd proved his fitness after recovering from a broken ankle inflicted by Neil Warnock's Leeds United last April. Despite missing the first match of the season, he returned for the next game against Chelsea and now appears to be a permanent fixture in the team, contrary to the expectations of many.

Because Jem is the type of player who so often goes unsung and unnoticed - but the type of player who is essential to the success of any team. He's the type of player whose contribution is often under-appreciated by supporters, who tend to look for the more spectacular. He doesn't make many magnificent 40-yard diagonal passes, he doesn't score many goals (seven in 113 league appearances for Reading) and he doesn't display many deft touches to beat opposition players. What he does do epitomise what Reading's game is all about, and the team's ethos of hard work - just quietly going about the business of putting in maximum effort and giving total commitment as he fulfils his role in the team.

And this role is essentially spoiling - closing down opponents, denying them time and space, hassling them into making an early pass, and hopefully winning the ball. He does this superbly well and it's something that's vital to any team - all the flair players in the world won't be effective if they rarely see the ball, or if they're constantly having to come back and defend, so a midfield powerhouse like Jem doing the hard work, un-sexy and unspectacular as it is, is critical to any team's success.

But it's not always easy to measure and appreciate just what a contribution Jem makes - although his statistics for number of tackles made are always impressively high, there's no easy way to quantify just how much he disrupts an opposing team's rhythm and prevents them playing the way they want to. But if this is proportionate to his workrate then it is noteworthy - in the Royals's last match, away at Swansea, Jem covered more ground than any other player that day, running 6.05 miles in the 90 minutes of the match. And that's a consistent story, for a player who always gives everything, and somehow still seems to be full of running at the end of the match.

Sadly, it's a fact of life that the contribution of players like Jem is sometimes overlooked by some supporters - James Harper suffered a similar lack of appreciation in Reading's previous Premier League spell - but the majority do recognise what Jem brings to the team. Jem is universally popular amongst Loyal Royals - although some may doubt his effectiveness in the team no-one ever questions his commitment or his attitude to the game.

For Jem truly is the proverbial model professional, and any doubts regarding his commitment to the club would have been dispelled the night Reading clinched promotion to the Premier League in April, at home to Nottingham Forest. Although still woozy on painkillers after an operation on his injured ankle that afternoon, Jem discharged himself from hospital and arrived at the stadium to celebrate promotion with his teammates.

So this international call-up is not unexpected, but it is long-overdue - and Turkey can be assured of maximum effort and maximum commitment whenever Jem is selected - and this marks a major stage in Jem's career as a top-class, Premier League midfielder ... and he can now add “full international" to the other accolades he's regularly gaining.

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