Jack Grealish is no longer England’s new poster boy and Pep Guardiola has been losing faith in him for months… but Gareth Southgate made a mistake in axing the £100m star, writes IAN LADYMAN

It’s almost a year since Jack Grealish stepped off the Manchester City party bus, squeezed the beer out of his T-shirt and joined the England squad for a Euro 2024 qualifier in Malta.

It was hot, it was sunny and Grealish’s positioning as the new poster boy of English football was complete.

Grealish was 27, a treble winner and the face of fashion brand Gucci. But even then there was a sense of possible impermanence. After all, England had been in such a situation before with gifted, almost maverick players, and it hadn’t always worked.

So, on a Thursday evening last June, manager Gareth Southgate stood in a corridor at the back of Malta’s Ta’Qali National Stadium and was asked about his new golden child and what challenges might await him.

“As I said to the City players, we’re all in a bit of a limbo,” Southgate replied. “We have had teams in the Champions League final but no team has won a treble, so for this group of players and staff, things will never be the same.

“We never get this group together again and everything in their lives changes. But anything I would tell them about the future, I would do in private. I don’t think discussing it publicly would do any good.

It all seemed rather insignificant at the time. A conversation about ifs, buts and maybes. But here we are in June 2024 and, as Southgate prepares to take a squad of 26 to the European Championship in Germany, Grealish will not be part of it.

If it’s not exactly a disgrace, it’s certainly quite a fall for a player who has always looked at home in England colours.

For what it’s worth, I think Southgate made a mistake. Grealish has always had a positive influence on any England team he has graced and Southgate admitted as much on Thursday. “I think the world of children,” he said.

Grealish is also extremely talented and would have given a dynamic option off the bench. Unlike Cole Palmer, Jarrod Bowen, Anthony Gordon and Eberechi Eze, he has tournament experience which can prove invaluable when the pressure mounts.

Southgate went for form and numbers though, and from that point of view the odds were stacked against Grealish since he finished his domestic season with a total of 10 minutes of football last month.

The noises coming from City regarding Pep Guardiola’s waning confidence in the player the club bought from Aston Villa for £100m in the summer of 2021 had been increasingly audible for some time.

Following City’s defeat to Manchester United in the FA Cup final two weeks ago, Guardiola denied there was a problem and suggested Grealish would “get back to his best” soon enough. What spoke louder, however, was that as City attempted to overturn a 2-0 deficit against their arch-rivals at Wembley, Grealish had been left on the bench.

Southgate is a firm believer in instinct. He tends to rely on his own eyes and his own interpretation of how the form may fluctuate. He is, however, taking advice from the club’s management, and Guardiola will have been honest with him about the difficulties endured by one of his senior players over the past nine months.

Grealish will be devastated by his omission, especially after an impressive appearance as a substitute against Bosnia in Newcastle on Monday night. Likewise, he does not lack self-awareness.

When I sat down with him for 45 minutes about a month after that Treble hit last year, he was wearing a Gucci tracksuit worth over £10,000, but his outlook on his life and career didn’t change. Couldn’t have been more real or more candid.

Speaking about the differences between him and teammate Erling Haaland, he joked that the Norwegian striker liked to take an ice bath after a match while he preferred a beer.

Filling up, a word once used by the late Sir Bobby Robson in relation to Paul Gascoigne, has always been a challenge for Grealish. He told me that he sometimes wished he could lead a different life, where anonymity would give him the right to move more freely.

He told me he had worn a wig on a night out in Manchester to ensure his anonymity. To this day, I don’t know if he was joking.

Grealish hardly drank during the second half of last season, but he admitted to struggling to cope with the mental demands of a campaign gone in the wake of last year’s triumph.

What do you offer the footballer who has everything? The opportunity to start again, frankly. For Grealish it proved a little too much, although it wasn’t a subject Southgate was keen to discuss on Thursday.

“I don’t think today is the right day to talk about the bigger picture,” he said. “I don’t think it would be fair. I just delivered a very difficult conversation to a devastated boy. I’m not going to go any further than that.

And Guardiola? Did he also play a role in this? Undoubtedly. Grealish has become a different player during his three years with the Catalan. The free runner from Villa Park has transformed himself at City into a player for whom team play and structure are paramount. It worked for the team, but did it work for the player?

One of the most common instructions Grealish hears from Guardiola is to win free kicks. He couldn’t be more pragmatic, less romantic, less ‘Grealish’ if he were covered in Birmingham City blue.

We shouldn’t give up on Grealish though. He’s a tough guy. The carefree image does not reflect reality. He cares deeply about his football and values ​​playing for his country highly. It won’t be long before we see photos of him vacationing on a Balearic island, Las Vegas or some similar outpost. He won’t spend the summer crying over his exclusion. Here at the England camp, however, he will be missed.

“It can light up a room,” Declan Rice said. “This week he was hilarious and made everyone angry. When he came in the other night I thought he was excellent, I chased him and his mentality was top notch. I can’t speak highly enough of him.

“I don’t know what his life is like, but he’s a great guy and I’m gutted for him because he’s one of my best friends. He’s such a down-to-earth, positive person and he is so positive about this group.

Rice also highlighted the benefits of a summer without football for Grealish and it was a good point. This could benefit Grealish and City, and perhaps England too.

It seems wrong to imagine a 26-man England team without Jack the Lad.

In the end, a three-goal, three-assist season in a Premier League-winning side did it for him.

However, it would be a surprise if he doesn’t return next season.