Jack Grealish is on the rise once again, but there’s a reason why he’s not in the England squad
Here’s the narrative, give or take a dash of melodrama: Jack Grealish, having wasted away at Manchester City for years, has sprung to life once more after moving to Everton, become his new club’s beating creative heartbeat, and it’s something of a crime that he hasn’t been recalled to the England squad by Thomas Tuchel.
Grealish scored his first Everton goal in the 2-1 win over Crystal Palace this weekend and has already created four more for his new side. He seems to have reignited the freewheeling spark that made him such a thrilling player to watch at Aston Villa and made him a man worth £100m. He’s easy to root for and a joy to watch, but the stats don’t entirely back up the narrative of a player back to his best – or even a player who has been any better than he was at the Etihad.
Why the stats suggest Everton’s Jack Grealish still isn’t back to his best
Given that Grealish only managed six goals and eight assists in all competitions over the last two seasons with Manchester City, the fact that he is already five goal contributions to the good just nine games into life at Everton certainly suggests a man regaining his best form. The smile on his face as he plays, just as importantly, seems to suggest a man rediscovering his love for the game, as well.
His return to prominence has been a rather joyful plot line across the opening months of the Premier League season, but the raw numbers underpinning his performances are, sadly, a little worrying, and may hint at the reasons that Thomas Tuchel has opted not to bring him back into the Three Lions fold for the upcoming matches against Wales and Latvia.
By most metrics outside of actual goals and assists – clearly the most important metrics, of course – Grealish has actually struggled in comparison to recent seasons. For instance, while he may have four assists to his name his average of 4.86 shooting chances created per game is down from 5.86 last season, never mind the 6.96 he managed in his final year at Aston Villa. His passing accuracy has dropped, too.
He's struggling with the ball at his feet, too. At Aston Villa, he beat an opposing player on the dribble 64.4% of the time in 2020/21. That fell to 44.8% by the time he was in his last season with Manchester City. Now, at Everton, it’s just 24.4%. Three quarters of the time, he fails to get past a defender when carrying the ball. That’s a long way below the standards normally expected from a top-tier winger.
The sample size is, of course, small, and there is a substantial caveat – it’s easier for a player to pad their stats out when playing for Manchester City, and he would naturally create more chances for a team which enjoys so much more possession, territory and opportunities than Everton do in a typical game. But that doesn’t explain why his numbers are so far below the bars set at Aston Villa a few years ago.
The simplest explanation is simply that he isn’t actually back to his best, and that there is some hard graft to be done to get there – but that because more of Everton’s play goes through him than Manchester City’s did when he was at the Etihad, he’s getting more chances to be the man who puts the final ball in to the box and is thus scoring and creating more simply because he’s on the field and in better positions for longer, rather than because he himself has improved or found his best form.
The assists he has under his belt do somewhat make the point. There was a superb ball across the box for Iliman Ndiaye’s opener against Brighton & Hove Albion, but others were routine – for instance, he gets credit for a simple backwards pass to James Garner which happened to end up rifled into the back of the net from around 25 yards. It goes down as an assist, but it’s a reach to suggest that Grealish did much to create it, or that Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the credit for his excellent strike against Wolverhampton Wanderers, for instance.
None of which is to belittle Grealish, an exceptionally talented player. He’s playing with a sense of freedom that has been lacking from his game for some time, and that’s generating echoes of his better days at Villa or during City’s treble-winning season, when he was quietly brilliant. But he isn’t back to his very best just yet.
Will Grealish get back into the England squad?
Even at his peak for Villa, Grealish was a peripheral figure in the England set-up. There was a sense that Gareth Southgate never quite trusted him, and in the limited chances he was given we never quite saw Grealish at his best in national colours.
Grealish’s marginalisation at Southgate’s hands was a source of fan frustration and some criticism from the media, and it will be interesting to see whether Tuchel feels similarly should Grealish prove that he can sustain his productive recent form or start to get back to his best in some of the areas in which he is struggling.
The left wing feels like a position which is open to auditions, however. Anthony Gordon is the first choice right now but if Grealish’s stats wave a few red flags then the Newcastle forward’s are mostly even worse – and he isn’t scoring or creating goals to paper over the cracks right now. His position probably should be in jeopardy based on recent form.
Phil Foden has all the talent in the world and is slowly getting back to something like his own best form on recent evidence, but has never convinced on the left for England – and he too has been left out this time. Marcus Rashford has had so many ups and downs in recent years that it’s hard to guess where his form will be by the time that the World Cup comes around.
Eberechi Eze is arguably more of a number ten than a left winger, Morgan Rogers certainly is, and so on. Tuchel has many options on the left, but none of them are sure things as it stands.
Still, Grealish has not made his own case just yet. He has started to be fun to watch once again, and if you squint a little then you can see the winger that Pep Guardiola was happy to pay £100m for. But the technical class and consistent creative ability haven’t quite reasserted themselves just yet.
As it stands, the argument for Grealish’s inclusion would be an emotive one, not one based on the stats or the performances that he is putting on tape. There’s a long way to go before Grealish be fairly said to be not only thrilling to watch but a player that a World Cup campaign can be based upon. It would be a lot of fun if he got there, and Everton fans are probably enjoying the ride enough not to fuss about the more damning corners of the data too much. Tuchel has to hold his selections a higher standard, though, and can’t afford to ignore the gap between the idea of Grealish, the hedonistic dream of what he could be, and the harsher reality of what he is actually doing on the pitch right now.
Continue Reading