Jack Grealish is a lovely, down-to-earth kid and I’ll start my latest column on him by saying the same thing I’ve said in the four or five I’ve written about him in the past.
Which is that all of the below is said only because I care. But whenever I see pictures of Grealish absolutely lagging – as he did to celebrate Manchester City’s Treble triumph – I fear he is making a rod for his own back. And I really don’t want that to be the case for him during his career or beyond it.
Look, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed myself when I was a professional footballer – boy, did I enjoy myself. So before anyone accuses me of being a curmudgeon or a hypocrite, I’m not trying to do that.
But what I do want Jack to realise is that there’s a time and a place... and the days before an international get-together is neither.
The problem in this country is that Dave the plasterer from Scunthorpe will have seen the pictures of Grealish being held up by team-mates and said, ‘Go on, Jack, that’s what I’d have done’.
Well, sorry, Dave, you’re not him, you hadn’t got to report for international duty. And frankly, no one gives two hoots about what you get up to in Magaluf or Malia.
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Grealish would have been better having one night to celebrate and then waiting until Tuesday, or Monday night if he really couldn’t, to head off to Las Vegas with his mates. This isn’t necessarily about what the general public thinks, either, but about how these things can be perceived by squad mates.
If you’ve been a consummate pro and someone else hasn’t, yet he gets indulged for it, then you start to think, ‘Hang on, how is he getting away with things I wouldn’t?’ And it can cause friction.
I saw it first hand with Paul Gascoigne. When he scored a wonder goal against Scotland at Wembley in 1996, Gazza was treated to the Dentist’s Chair. It was all a big laugh. Then suddenly, it wasn’t.
So I just don’t think there’s any value in being seen in the state Grealish was in. And if England had been facing Holland, Germany or Italy, he’d have given Gareth Southgate a quandary.
People might say, ‘But the City players will have been told they’d miss the first game and we’ve always known it was going to be Malta and then only North Macedonia’.
Look, Ederson said the City lads enjoyed a really good night before he joined up with Brazil. And Ruben Dias certainly did by the sounds of it. But that was one night.
Grealish has a history now that goes back to photos of him collapsed on a street in Marbella. I just don’t want to see pictures of him in 25 years, nursing a bottle and people talking about him in the same way they talk about Gazza.
It’s a lifestyle choice and while Grealish represents Gen Z, he needs to remember that nobody gives a damn about the majority of them and they aren’t going to end up on the back or front of a paper. The things he does now will also stick with him – Dwight Yorke was the consummate pro but after dating Katie Price he developed a party boy reputation and he can’t get an opening as a manager where he wants to all these years later.
Robbie Fowler was tagged in with the Spice Boys and has struggled to get the opportunities he perhaps felt he deserved. It’s not necessarily fair... but it’s the way it goes.
I just don’t want the brutal reality of having a relationship with alcohol, or being seen to have one, to bite Grealish now or down the line.
