Keith Duggan: Grealish’s dream move in danger of turning into a nightmare

“I think what Jack has to do now is grow up,” Roy Keane says, glowering and meaning it while the camera is fixed on the boy himself warming up for a rare starting XI spot before Manchester City play Peterborough in the cup.

This was in March. Behind Keane's urgent observations of what Jack Grealish needs to do, the sound of the Smiths comes travelling through the sound system and bounces around the Stadium of Light and into the Sky studio.

“I would go out tonight,” yodels Morrissey as if this is still the north of England of Thatcher and quiffs and pop escapism, “but I haven’t got a stitch to wear”.

It’s a very brilliant and very Manchester moment.

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And it’s one of the many fragmented visuals which float around the cybersphere as evidence of the unhappy, stop-start, suffocating season which Jack Grealish has endured since his £100 million transfer to Manchester.

Was it really only last summer?

There was a sense of manifest destiny and voodoo conviction at work in Real Madrid’s resurrection from the dead against City last Wednesday night.

But there is something equally uncanny about the way in which the analysis of City's unforgettable stumble just seconds before they made it to the finish line and the final has moved from the manager, Pep Guardiola, to the form of Jack Grealish.

Even before the extra-time period had finished, the television director began to issue repeated viewings of the Grealish dribble-and-shot which Ferland Mendy cleared off the line.

Here was irrefutable proof of Madrid’s indomitable spirit and, for City fans, a tortuous, perpetual reminder of just how close they came to what would have been a showdown for the ages against Liverpool in Paris.

The swift analysis is that had Grealish’s shot finished where it would have done 99 times out of 100, the skies would have cleared for him. He would have been the hero of Madrid, the saviour of the hour. But that narrative is flawed in that it is set against the subsequent knowledge of Madrid’s audacious three-goals-in-five minutes storming of the senses.

Had Grealish scored at that point, City would have led 6-3 on aggregate. Even Madrid would have guessed the game was up. The air would have left the Bernabeu and Grealish’s goal, in so far as it was remembered at all, would have been a pleasing footnote to a supremely comfortable night for the Manchester club.

Best manager

Instead, Grealish has found himself in a renewed firestorm of speculation and analysis this weekend. Guardiola has given Grealish just 19 starts this season as he has tried to figure out how to blend his new signing’s instinctive, free-running talents into his own sophisticated and absolutist vision of the game.

Shortly after joining City, Grealish sat down for an obligatory in-house interview in which he said all the right things about playing for the best manager in the world and how they’d had a terrific chat about “positions and stuff like that”. For Guardiola’s part, he has spoken of how he wanted to sign Grealish “from the very first time he saw him play”.

The comment evokes the famous line by Alex Ferguson on Ryan Giggs – "I remember the first time I saw him. He was 13 and just floated over the ground like a Cocker Spaniel chasing a piece of silver paper on the wind."

The difference is that Manchester United had identified and cultivated Giggs through their youth system. Guardiola saw and wanted Grealish on his team in an abstract way, in much the way a child is drawn to glittering things in a vast toy shop. So he issued the City boardroom an edict to buy the Villa and England star, at whatever cost.

Grealish’s much-trumpeted move to City, after 19 years with Aston Villa (most of his sentient life) confirmed for many the hollowness of the contemporary Manchester City story.

Behind the sweeping brilliance and overwhelming craft and speed of their play lies the cold sense of the entire show as concocted, purchased too smoothly: that the transformation of City from Manchester’s hip alternative football choice to a crushing, imperious machine has never felt authentic or truly right. That it has all been created through infinite finance and the shrewd acquisition of Guardiola, who transformed the financial potential into what we see on the field of play.

And it’s why the football community at large delights in Guardiola’s ongoing European nightmares with City.

His teams are simply too brilliant not to habitually destroy the limited yeomanry of the English game – and most of the European clubs. But what money and tactics cannot ward off are the vagaries and quirks and spirits of the game. They seem to rail against Guardiola’s City team more than seems reasonable or fair. Little wonder he appeared to be shocked over that dizzying closing half hour on Wednesday.

To recover his shattered thoughts; to face the cameras and the questions cannot have been easy even for someone of Guardiola’s experience. Naturally, the Grealish goal chances came up and Guardiola alluded to them. It was an opportunity for Guardiola to offer a shield for his player to observe that Grealish had done everything right, that he had been denied by two freakish moments of defensive intervention. But he didn’t really do that.

The implication hung there that “Jack” had chances to win it all for City and just didn’t take them. The storyline helped to distract from other potential storylines – such, for instance, as Guardiola’s decision to withdraw Kevin deBruyne after 72 minutes. Yes, City had firm control of the game and the tie then. But what could possibly be gained by withdrawing your best player?

Poster boy

Even before the Bernabeu was empty, the deluge of post-game analysis concentrated on the Grealish miss – and on his defensive positioning on the cross that led to Madrid’s equalising goal. It was enough oxygen to create a wildfire of speculation – that Grealish hasn’t worked out; that City may eat the loss and move him on in the summer.

Of course, there is a parallel football story for Grealish in which he does not withdraw from an Ireland call-up literally minutes before he was to be announced on Martin O’Neill’s senior squad in 2015. He sticks with his Ireland underage team-mates and is, by now, the superstar in Stephen Kenny’s attractive young side.

He would watch Gareth Southgate’s England storming through the Euro 2020 championships and wonder what might have been. He thrives with Villa. Do Manchester City rush to sign him anyway? Do they want him if he is not the poster boy of a rising England team? Maybe. But Villa cannot command a hundred million quid of a transfer fee.

And Grealish would have a chance to feel and play his way into the demanding and in some ways limiting environment of Guardiola's football vision. He's beyond wealthy and is beginning to enter the same commercial realm as David Beckham.

But the United star had the minutes and grafts and seasons of consistent excellence to substantiate and justify the poster campaigns. Right now, at 26, Jack Grealish stands at a treacherous place and has not been helped by the greatest manager in the world.

The demand to recover their poise and morale to close out the Premier League is the immediate goal for a City team who have gone through a harrowing few days.

It could well be that they need a result going into the final day of the season if they are to win their third Premier League title in a row. And in the mischievous, fated way of these things, City’s final game of the season will be against Grealish’s boyhood club Aston Villa.

What a moment for Grealish; past and future mingling. Whether Guardiola has him experience it on the field of play or the best seat in the house will sum up the grim story of his dream season.