It was a night to remember. Liverpool 5-5 Arsenal at Anfield in a League Cup tie, which, unlike so many games in that competition, was not played like something grudgingly squeezed into the fixture list.
That October night seven years ago was for young players and in retrospect Arsenal’s seem more impressive than Liverpool’s – Emiliano Martinez, Bukayo Saka, Dani Ceballos and Gabriel Martinelli. Nonetheless, Liverpool won the penalty shootout, and it was on their teenagers that the spotlight fell.
Harvey Elliott won a penalty, Neco Williams provided the assist for Divock Origi’s 94th-minute equaliser, which forced the tie to penalties. The winning kick, Liverpool’s fifth, was put away by an 18-year-old from Toxteth, Curtis Jones.
If that was the first time Jones had come to the public’s attention in a Liverpool shirt, the last may be the spat with his teammate Dominik Szoboszlai on a tour of the United States. It lasted a few seconds, no longer than the time it took Jones to walk to the spot and put his penalty past the goalkeeper who would appear in two World Cup finals for Argentina. It would, however, be subject to rather more debate.
Perhaps a reason why Jones showed his anger at Yankee Stadium was because he knew his time with his club, the one whose teams he began playing for as an eight-year-old, was coming to an end and it might have been nice to have been captain of Liverpool even for a few minutes in a friendly. In the final game, in Chicago, Szoboszlai did hand him the armband, although that was rather overshadowed by the 4-2 defeat by Leeds in which Jones did not play well.
The arguments to sell him to Inter Milan appear compelling and here is a reason to think Jones might prosper at San Siro in the same way that Scott McTominay flowered at Napoli after leaving Manchester United.
He is a confident boy. In that cup tie against Arsenal, Origi, the man who had scored the killer goal in the Champions League final against Tottenham four months earlier, was due to take the final penalty but Jones stepped in and took the ball. At 25, he has been part – if not at the forefront of – two Premier League title-winning squads. At 25, Robbie Fowler, that other kid from Toxteth, had won a single League Cup.
If Inter can be persuaded to up their offer to £40m, then Liverpool may well let him go and because he is a product of their own academy that £40m will count as pure profit when the Premier League come to assess their Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) compliance.
Compared to Aston Villa, Chelsea or Everton, Liverpool are not in great danger of a breach. However, there has been plenty of attention on the £225m the club spent last summer on Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak and rather less on how little they sold. Mo Salah, Andrew Robertson, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Ibrahima Konate, all of whom ran down their contracts, raised £8.4m between them. Jones has a year left on his. Liverpool can barely afford another free transfer.
Yet there will be disquiet if he goes. The Premier League academy system has been one of the successes of the age, one of the reasons why England are now regular tournament semi-finalists, but they rarely produce players for the clubs that fund them.
Read more
Of Andoni Iraola’s first-team squad, Jones is one of only two who were born on Merseyside and are products of the Liverpool academy and the right-back, Conor Bradley, developed his football in Northern Ireland. The rest are imports, sometimes from other academies. The realisation that, despite the huge investment in the academy at Kirby, Bradley will be all the first team have to show for itself will be a sobering one.
It is a national problem. If you judge success by the number of footballers who grew up in a club’s academy and played at least ten league games for them last season, then Brentford, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Fulham did not produce anyone. Brighton and Tottenham managed one each.
There are some who have bucked the trend and chief among them is the club whose teenagers lost that astonishing cup tie. Arsenal have four, which may be another reason to celebrate their success.
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/InBZmA2
Post a Comment