In the words of the TV comedy geniuses Dick Emery and Roy Kinnear, Manchester City will be looking at one of the big decisions they made two summers ago and thinking: ‘I got it wrong, Dad!’
Anyone of our vintage will remember that line — and it sums up how City called it wrong in allowing Cole Palmer to go to Chelsea last season. I’m sure there are other players they could have cashed in on. Chelsea paid £40million for Palmer but if Real Madrid come knocking next summer and he is still at the level he is showing, I would not be surprised if they got an offer of £150m for him.
He’s a young man, so we’re going early on this call, but if this is Palmer’s level and he can be consistently this good, he’s going to be a top man. He has got silky skills, athleticism and a fabulous football brain. There’s simply nothing to dislike about him. He’s 22. At that age, no one ought to be that good.
I like his temperament, too. You can read a lot into a player from their reaction when they score, and Palmer doesn’t go mad when he finds the net. He seems to have a really sensible head and he looks to have had a really good football education — which you would expect at the modern Manchester City.
His best position? Well, football is quite simple at times, if you don’t overcomplicate it as many seem to want to do. You just want your best players — a player like Palmer — on the ball as much as you can. He is one of those where you give him the shirt and say, ‘just go out and cause mischief with the ball, son. And when you lose it, get back into our defensive shape as quickly as possible.’ You don’t need to tell players like that anything else.
Cole Palmer is the real deal – Manchester City got it horribly wrong letting him go last summer
No one ought to be as good as he is at 22 and he seems to have a really sensible head too
Enzo Maresca should be ensuring the midfielder gets on the ball as much as possible to work his magic
He may like to drift in from the wide area, but I think he would want to spend more time in the middle, where he’s going to get more of the ball and spend more time near the opposition box. I would be looking to get him just off the front somewhere, where he basically has a license to get on the ball, while the lesser players fill in for him. He looks to have a fabulous appetite for the game and is not shy in doing the hard yards — working when he doesn’t have the ball.
A No 8 or a No 10? I just don’t view the game through numbers like that. They’re immaterial, for the reasons I have outlined.
Pep will have realised by now that Palmer was one he should have kept, and the player seems to have been spurred on by having to accept that City didn’t fancy him enough to do what they had to do to keep him. Being released was certainly a spur for me, when Bill Nicholson at Tottenham decided he didn’t fancy me and sold me to Middlesbrough for £30,000 in 1974. It was a kick up the backside and within four years I was being sold for a record fee between two English clubs, when Liverpool signed me for £352,000.
I advocated in this column for Palmer to get more game-time at the Euros and I still stand by the view Gareth Southgate didn’t utilise him and others as well as he should at that tournament. We were hearing about ‘loyalty to players.’ What absolute nonsense. In tournament football, it is not — and never should be — about who had the jersey last time out. It’s about who’s in form. On the basis of the season so far, Palmer is the first name on the team sheet for the game against Greece next week.
Declan Rice is the other one who must play because he is the midfielder with more of a defensive head. The abundance of creative players is the gorgeous dilemma that Lee Carsley now has, though he has said he won’t fit them all into the same side in the next two internationals. I would have Phil Foden on the left, Bukayo Saka on the right, with Harry Kane up top — and Jude Bellingham and Cole either side of a sitting Rice.
There must be caveats to discussions like this about young players. For whatever reason, some who shine don’t get any better and get their head turned. I just don’t see that in Palmer.
I wouldn’t put a number on the amount of goals I’d want from him this season if I were his manager, but I’d be telling him I’d be disappointed if he ends with fewer than a number beginning with ‘2’.
Palmer should be the first name on the England team sheet for their game against Greece next week
Lee Carsley should be lining up with Palmer and Bellingham (left) either side of Declan Rice
You chose to buy these flops, Erik!
My assessment of Manchester United here last month was that I thought they’d be better this season, but the past five weeks suggest I may have been wrong.
I saw them at Crystal Palace where they were good and should have won. But against Tottenham they were poor, even before Bruno Fernandes was sent off. Spurs looked fabulous but how much of that ‘fabulous’ was United being average?
The Fernandes dismissal was harsh. He did have a bit of a kick-out but you won’t break anyone’s leg doing that. But the fundamental point is this: many players are better than what they are showing and that’s on Erik because a manager’s No 1 job must be to get the best out of his players. The club spent big again last summer but neither Manuel Ugarte, Matthijs de Ligt nor Noussair Mazraoui convince me.
Erik can’t say United haven’t supported him. By buying so many Dutch players, he has told the club: ‘I know these players. They will do a good job.’ If someone had brought them to his attention and he didn’t fancy them, he could have said: ‘No, I’ve worked with them before and they’re not for me.’ He has driven those transfers. His future now depends on making them work out.
Erik ten Hag is to blame for Manchester United’s struggled – the players are better than they have been showing
His future depends on making the players he has helped bring into the club work out
Anfield remembers
Liverpool have been remembering two pillars of the club in the past week.
On Tuesday, it was the funeral of Ron Yeats, the former captain and central defender, who was my chief scout when I was manager there. I know he had been living with dementia, a horrendous illness, for many years. I send my sincerest condolences to the great man’s family.
Last weekend was the anniversary of Bill Shankly’s death. After his retirement, we players would often see him when we came up through the front door into the stadium on match-days. After we passed the reception area and headed down two steps, he would generally be there, standing on the right-hand side, leaning against the wall, looking to speak to a few players. He was the architect of the great club Liverpool are today.
Scotland’s struggles subsist
This last week has been a sobering one for Scottish football and a reminder of how the game has evolved in a cruel way for our clubs. Both of the giants in Glasgow have suffered depressing defeats.
Celtic faced a Dortmund team who lost 5-1 at Stuttgart two weeks ago and had to come from 2-0 down to beat Bochum last week, so Brendan Rodgers’s thinking would have been, ‘We’re firing on all cylinders and they’re not, so we can go there and take them on and outscore them.’ I can understand that thinking, but it didn’t happen and Celtic came unstuck on a grand scale, losing 7-1.
In my old team Rangers’ case, they were playing at home in a European competition where they had previously gone to Malmo and won, and thought they could take on the opposition this time — Lyon. They also got beat up badly, which again showed up the huge gulf.
Brendan Rodgers’ Celtic were humbled 7-1 by an out-of-form Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League
Rangers, meanwhile, were playing at home to Lyon, but got beat up badly and the gulf in quality was clear to see
It’s a simple question of economics and where the money is in football, now. My old team, Rangers, earned £8.28m in domestic and European TV money last season. My local team, Bournemouth — which is not a football town and where 11,000 will attend home games — got in excess of £100m. That’s the gulf in money we are looking at.
It came to the surface all too quickly in Dortmund and Glasgow.