Grealish should have seen Souness rant coming but Liverpool legend is wrong
Now that Paul Pogba is inactive, Jack Grealish should have seen this coming - another withering, lengthy put-down from Graeme Souness.
"No threat… no end-product… takes too many touches… very predictable… does not see the picture early enough… slows the team down…" Come on, Souey, don’t sugarcoat it.
“He needs to have a close look at himself,” the Liverpool legend declared in his newspaper column. And if he does, Grealish will see a player who was an integral part of a team that won the Premier League, the FA Cup and the Champions League last season. A player who has been incapacitated for a good chunk of this current campaign, a player who has established himself in the England squad.
By common consent, Grealish performed well last season - Pep Guardiola certainly thought so. But roughly a third of the way into the 2023/24 campaign and Grealish is, according to Souness, “at a crossroads in his City career.”
Souness is a diamond character, a really nice guy, a bit of a softie under that tough exterior, hugely knowledgeable, smashing company, always worth listening to. But, not for the first time, his assessment of 28-year-old Grealish seems gratuitously harsh. His latest tirade seems to have been prompted by Jeremy Doku’s impact at the Etihad and the rapid Belgian has made his presence felt, no doubt about that.
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Souness describes Doku as Guardiola’s go-to player on that attacking left side, presumably on the basis of the 21-year-old’s eight Premier League starts, compared to Grealish’s three Premier League starts. But for three of Doku’s Premier League starts, Grealish was unavailable.
Is Jack Grealish at a crossroads in his Manchester City career? Let us know in the comments below!
Graeme Souness has said Jack Grealish needs to have a "close look at himself" (Getty Images)And in the Champions League, Grealish has started four times while Doku has made just one start. Doku probably is Pep’s preferred choice right now but it is worth remembering that he plumped for Grealish when City went to Old Trafford five weeks ago and produced, arguably, their best performance of the season.
As if anyone needed reminding, Souness says he wanted to start every game during his playing days and that if he was fit, he did. He would not have tolerated rotation.
But that was then and this is now and few players under Guardiola are immune from rotation in a season that normally stretches beyond 60 matches for the modern era’s most successful English club.
Souness uses statistics to hand Jack a familiar beating, pointing out he has not scored in his last 30 games for club and country and has only two assists this season. He has a point when it comes to goals and the player himself would be the first to admit it, but there is a selflessness to Grealish’s play that Guardiola loves.
And the one statistic that will definitely matter to the City boss is that his team has not lost a match which Grealish has started since the beginning of February (although they were losing when he was hooked the other night).
Is Grealish struggling to get back into a rhythm and back to his best after being sidelined by dead leg complications for a month? Almost certainly.
Is Grealish at a crossroads in his City career? Most certainly not.
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