Why always you, Jack? Grealish looks an accident waiting to happen
IAN HERBERT: Why always you, Jack? Out on the tiles again (although Pep Guardiola insists he wasn’t drunk)… £100m man Grealish looks like an accident waiting to happen
- Jack Grealish was filmed being navigated away from Albert’s Schloss bar
- He looked worse for wear but Pep Guardiola has played down the incident
- It is another piece of footage the playmaker will wish was not out there
- If £100m Grealish wants to truly fulfil his potential he must show self discipline
Pep Guardiola had a prepared one-liner about the footage of Jack Grealish wandering around near Manchester town hall with a lollipop in his mouth, being navigated away from Albert’s Schloss bar.
Did this bother him, the Manchester City manager was asked? ‘A lot. I’m so upset because they didn’t invite me…’ he replied.
And because deadpan is just not Guardiola’s style, there was a brief, uncomfortable silence when nobody knew whether to laugh. ‘I don’t like it,’ the manager continued. ‘Hopefully next time they can invite me and do the dinner correctly.’
Man City boss Pep Guardiola played down the footage of Jack Grealish with a joke
Guardiola’s candour on these issues when dropping Grealish and Phil Foden at Newcastle in December — ‘When behaviour off the pitch is not proper, they are not going to play,’ he said, after they did not turn up to a recovery session ‘in the right condition’ — means we must take him and the club at face value on this.
They say that Grealish was unable to access the Bavarian beer hall on Sunday night because of confusion about exactly where he’d been booked in for dinner.
But in the words of the legendary T-shirt once worn by another highly complicated Manchester City forward, why is it always him?
Grealish’s scrapes in the past few years — including pranging his Range Rover when he was supposed to be in lockdown — have been less dramatic than Mario Balotelli setting his house alight with fireworks and later contributing to a fire safety campaign. But for a player looking to cement his as-yet fragile position in the Premier League’s outstanding side, he does look like an accident waiting to happen.
A few seconds of footage from a highly excitable TikTok user does not present an open and shut case. But this is another piece of footage that the player should really wish was just not out there — a bit like the snaps, since deleted, of himself letting his hair down after the Euro 2020 final.
The Manchester City and England star appeared to be worse for wear on a night out
To see Guardiola sitting down to answer questions on Tuesday, sartorially immaculate, cognitively sharp, branching out into the occasional new word of English, offered some insight into how the best of the best in elite sport live and breathe.
The popular image of Grealish as a wild, anachronistic contrast to all that does obscure the realities of how they remember him at Aston Villa’s Bodymoor Heath training ground.
Before the pandemic wreaked its chaos, they spoke of seeing him in the gym there many an evening, working with his personal strength and conditioning coach. He left the place at 7pm some nights.
In the buttoned-up world of Premier League football, there is also something appealing about his non-conformity: the raffish exterior, the rather too cultivated hair and the vivid facial expressions on the pitch. But as someone put it recently, the Grealish we knew at Villa has been ‘lost down the back of the sofa’ at City.
He implied a few months ago that this was not all about him. ‘I thought I’d have more of the ball, get more assists and goals but it doesn’t work like that at all,’ he said. ‘I’ve had nowhere near as much of the ball as I used to get at Villa.’
But the unvarnished truth is that he must raise his game to another level if he is to look back one day and say that he actually belongs among the best squad of players that the Premier League has ever known. A star among stars, not just the leader of lesser mortals in his hometown team.
Man City insist it was the players’ own decision not to go into the packed Albert’s Schloss bar (pictured on Google Maps Street View)
The incident comes less than two months after Grealish and Phil Foden (left) were dropped by Guardiola ‘for not being in the right condition’ after a night out
Sanctimonious it may sound, but a place in such company entails the kind of abstemiousness and self-discipline that Guardiola always knew as a player and which, for all that he said on Tuesday, he will want to see more of from Grealish.
There’s a reason why Silvia Tremoleda, the Spanish nutritionist, banned alcohol at City’s academy.
Grealish has barely started where his new club are concerned, with three goals and three assists in 24 appearances this season. At the age of 26, he hardly has endless years ahead.
If he maintains the pattern traceable throughout his career — sprawled on a Tenerife street by a packet of fags at 19, dropped after a boozy night at Manchester’s Panacea nightclub in 2015 — then his late 20s and 30s will be unremittingly tough.
Just ask Wayne Rooney, who revealed in interviews at the weekend that he now knows his career, built on instinct and rapid reactions, was cut short by booze.
‘It had an impact on me on the back end of my time,’ Rooney said. ‘You are playing OK and think you can get away with it. But you can’t. You can’t do that as an athlete.’
Grealish must show some self discipline to become the player he is capable of being
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