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SOUNESS

His blistering verdict on Mings and Gerrard. You will not want to miss a word...

GRAEME SOUNESS

Iwon’t be joining the love-in for tyrone Mings, the man Steven Gerrard has stripped of the Aston Villa captaincy in a move which, summed up in one sentence, says: ‘I just don’t fancy you.’

Mings is ‘well-loved in the dressing room’, apparently. well, when he appeared a couple of times on Zoom for shows we were doing on Sky Sports during lockdown, I thought: ‘For a young man who’s not achieved anything in the game you’ve a hell of a lot to say.’

He’d been talking about how footballers were viewed as ‘commodities’ at the time and I asked him if he didn’t think players were incredibly fortunate to be doing their job. He had an answer for me, of course, but that encounter told me a lot.

As captain of Liverpool aged 30, having won a great deal and captained my country, I could not have offered up an opinion in a team meeting. And if I had, there would have been Joe Fagan and Ronnie Moran shaking their heads and Bob Paisley pretending he didn’t hear me.

times change. It’s fine being able to communicate and get your message across. But only so long as you can back it up. Mings is talking a good game without achieving anything and I include in that assessment some of his 1 v 1 contests against some of the Premier League’s stronger strikers. It wasn’t even a contest when he went up against Romelu Lukaku

‘If Villa win games, the pressure on Gerrard recedes and Mings becomes an irrelevance’

when Chelsea were at Villa Park last Christmas.

I can’t emphasise strongly enough the significance of what Steven has done here, though. It’s not like you’re just leaving a player out, or even subbing him after 10 minutes. this is you making a statement that there’s something about this guy that is fundamentally wrong. You’ve embarrassed him. He will think he’s been publicly humiliated and in that dressing room he will now have two or three allies who will agree he’s been treated incorrectly.

Steven clearly believes that it’s something he has to be firm on and not pussyfoot about with. He had Mings on the bench in the defeat by Bournemouth last Saturday and said he’d only be back ‘when he looks me in the eye and shows he’s ready’. that was some statement. It’s not like the question has been sprung on him in a press conference. He’s known it’s coming, chosen his words carefully and they’re damning. He won’t have taken that decision lightly.

the difficulty for a manager is that he can’t say publicly all that he knows. I had very good captains when I was a manager. Ian Rush at Liverpool, Alan Shearer at newcastle, Garry Flitcroft at Blackburn — proper men. But when Craig Bellamy was being difficult at

newcastle — we ended up squaring up in a meeting room — everyone seemed to take his side because he was such a hugely popular figure in that part of the world.

these days a manager has his press officer to sit down with prior to making this decision, to say, ‘How are we going to deal with this going forward?’ I never had any of that.

Steven has had all summer to think about this and make a judgment on how it will be interpreted. It could be that something has happened in pre-season — a straw that broke the camel’s back — which explains why it’s happening now.

Gerrard has put his neck on the block, made the big call and the big statement, and I can see why he might feel the need to do so. But it is fine to make those big calls for as long as you’re getting them right.

From here, Villa have to start winning games and improving because if they don’t and Steven has to bring Mings back, the player is seen to be winning the argument. Villa have spent money and Steven is facing questions

about his capability for the first time in his career as either a player or manager.

If they win games, that pressure recedes and tyrone Mings becomes an irrelevance, who no one even talks about. If he doesn’t, then the decision is going to be like a sore on his backside. Every time he sits down he’ll be aware of it.

FOOTBALL

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2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/283394835608836

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