Southgate: I’m a maker not breaker
GARETH SOUTHGATE defended his use of Jack Grealish at the Euros saying he did not want to ‘break’ him.
The Three Lions chief insisted he had earmarked a more prominent role for the £100million man during the tournament, but had to change his plans.
Grealish went into the competition on the back of a nagging shin complaint that had sidelined him for more than three months.
In fact, he only returned to action four matches before the end of Aston Villa’s season – and there were doubts he was going to make it at all. But Grealish shone during a string of cameo performances that helped seal a record switch to the Etihad afterwards.
Physically
Southgate said: “Jack missed 14 weeks towards the end of the season. So, what we had him inked in for became a little more complicated.
“He could only train two days out of three and we had to try to get the best physically from him without breaking him.
“We also had to make sure that he didn’t get a recurrence of the shin problem that ruled him out.
“Although some decisions might appear simple from the outside, internally there was a lot of complexity around training loads and decisions to be made about all of those issues.”
Southgate now faces a similar problem to Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola.
It was clear during the opening fixture at Spurs that there might be duplication between Grealish and Raheem Sterling.
However, Southgate believes a solution will present itself at club level and he does have options for the Three Lions to
play the pair together, too. He added: “It’s going to take a period of time for Jack to adapt because I think Pep is very specific on his goals and positional discipline with and without the ball. For any player that’s going to take time to get used to. And Jack’s no different.
“There are possibilities for us to play them both. There were moments when Jack came on that Raheem moved to the right and scored goals so that’s something we can look at.
“The good thing is that we have four of five players now at Manchester City and that’s a help for us because they’ve got that cohesion and experience of playing together.”
Southgate also said the penalty-takers who missed their spot-kicks in the shoot-out against Italy in the final would have to ‘work through’ abuse from the stands.
Jadon Sancho was baited by Leeds fans during the opening-day fixture with the chant ‘You let your country down.’ Southgate said: “Generally, there have been some fabulous responses. I was at Brentford when Bukayo Saka got an amazing reception.
“I think even some of the supporters that were singing those things were saying:
‘We know it’s not the case but they’re our rivals, we’re into club football now and we’re going to try to put those players off their game’.
“It’s something the players are going to have to work through.”