Jack Grealish reminds you of England great Paul Gascoigne? Don't go down that road - Paul Parker

ByPaul Parker

Published 20/11/2020 at 12:54 GMT

After a long international break, former England and Manchester United defender Paul Parker does not think the hype around Jack Grealish is justified and feels it is wrong to build him up to the extent that he is now being compared to Parker's old national team-mate Paul Gascoigne after only five caps for the Three Lions. Parker also believes the 25-year-old takes too many touches.

As a country, we have created this idea of ‘Jack Grealish is going to be the greatest ever English player'. Where has that come from? It’s absolutely ridiculous.

I just don’t get the hype around him to be perfectly honest. Then you get the ones who come up and say ‘ah, he reminds us of Gazza’. Please don’t do that now when you see games against Republic of Ireland and Belgium... when we’re 2-0 down and he’s running around and wants to have around 35 touches to then pass the ball to somebody.

Everyone says he gets fouled all the time, but what is a foul and what isn’t a foul? A foul now is only when someone touches you and it throws you to the floor. Nine times out of ten they’re not fouls anymore. At the moment he doesn’t want to show strength - he falls over.

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All of a sudden it’s, ‘that makes him good because everyone wants to foul him’. He has too many touches.

In today’s football you watch the great midfield players – a lot of them not English - and look how many touches they have. Grealish has five, six and he goes left, right then flicks it back to somebody. You’re left thinking ‘really?’

Someone put a stat up about what he’s done and what he’s achieved already and captioned it ‘Andres Iniesta hadn’t done that at his age’. Please don’t go down that road. I don’t know why we keep doing it.

Now we have him pinned as the one who is going to win England the Euros. He has not played against a decent team. As much as Belgium are meant to be the team ranked number one in the world they are poor. You just know in two years time they have got no one coming through.

Jack Grealish simply loves comparisons to Gazza

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