You can’t teach it... Jack’s a natural
ONE-TIME Aston Villa academy supremo Bryan Jones couldn’t believe his ears. “If Mason Mount’s better than Jack, I’ll eat my hat,” he said down the phone, not knowing of Jack Grealish’s latest England snub prior to the Post telling him the news.
Jones has witnessed more closely than anyone the rise of Grealish from boy to man.
“I tended to look for players who could play the game, I wasn’t bothered by pace or power,” he explained from his home in Barnt Green.
Grealish arrived at Bodymoor Heath around the age of nine while, nine years later, he was chucked on by Paul Lambert at Manchester City for his Villa debut.
“I don’t usually judge (young players) until they hit secondary school,” said Jones, a man, if you didn’t know, who was behind the brilliant academy which blossomed the likes of Gary
Cahill, Barry Bannan, Gareth Barry, Gabby Agbonlahor and Marc Albrighton, as well as young Grealish.
“You look at Barry Bannan, what a player he was. He should be in the Premier League but there you go. He’s what 5ft 6in, size doesn’t matter and Jack was the same, average to small build. At youth level Jack, who was 15/16, was playing with the under-18s.
“He could do things with the ball you couldn’t believe, the way he’d ghost past people, you’d be there thinking how the hell has he done that. We’d play him wide left most of the time but he wasn’t an outand-out winger. He wasn’t ultraquick, either, but he had this knack of getting his body in between players and he’d either dribble past them or win a foul. He’s still doing that today, isn’t he.
“One thing we’d always say he could do with improving on is his goals. He didn’t score enough, wasn’t selfish enough and that’s something the new manager’s looking at. Jack should be telling himself I’ll have that one (putting the ball into the net).”
Jones added: “One of Jack’s greatest skills, for me, is that pass over 10 to 15 yards, the weight of it. He can open teams up with it, you can’t teach it. It’s natural knowing just how much to put on the pass, he takes players out of the game. His first touch was everything.”
One of Jones’s last involvements during his on-off 32-year career at Villa was the Hong Kong Soccer 7s tournament in the summer of 2014. Grealish had just completed a year on loan at Notts County and was part of young Villa side including Daniel Johnson, Josh Webb, Janoi Donacien and Khalid Abdo.
“The Soccer 7s in Hong Kong was a stand-out moment. We took Grealish over and he was great value on and off the pitch. He’s such a brilliant character, is Jack, which is testament to his brilliant family. It was a great summer.”
Back-tracking a little, it was Martin O’Neill who first came across Grealish - and Jones had in-depth conversations with the first-team manager about the youngster as well as Bannan, who is six years Grealish’s senior.
The Scottish playmaker was on the cusp of breaking through and there were talks about when to give them a chance.
“We had to be careful, especially with Jack,” explained Jones, now retired. “You can give players too much, too soon and by that I mean fast-tracking them into the first team. There’s a heck of a lot of learning to do. Jack would stay in digs, for example, in Sutton, to learn and mature.”
Grealish was 18 when he was on the brink of a first-team call-up, and had just completed a year at Notts County.
“Lambert wasn’t too keen to push the younger ones,” said Jones. “The money was drying up and Jack would continue to get game-time with the under-23s but, at youth level, he was simply too good and found it very, very easy.”