Jack Grealish certainly thinks he’s a £100million player. ‘Yeah. Maybe,’ he said last September when asked if he always believed the monumental release clause Aston Villa put into his contract would be met.
Others are less certain. The former Liverpool player Dirk Kuyt thinks the price tag is three times Grealish’s actual value. Celebrity Manchester City fan Liam Gallagher thinks that price puts Phil Foden’s worth at £500million.
The evidence of the Bernabeu suggests that they were right. It is unimaginable that Mo Salah, Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry, Michael Owen or any other forward in the same bracket as Grealish would have failed to take one of his two golden chances to put Real Madrid out of sight.
Jack Grealish squandered to golden chances to put Man City in the Champions League final
That £100million is supposed to buy you ice cold delivery in the white heat of split-second opportunity. But two chances came, the world held its breath and two chances went, when converting them is really not that complicated for the best of the best.
‘I just did it,’ Owen once said of his most prodigious years. ‘It didn’t matter who I was playing against. I had an unshakeable self-belief. Nothing bothered me.’
Grealish just doesn’t seem to have that kind of certainty. Of course, his razzle-dazzle style of football does not lend itself to the automated, metronomic way Guardiola’s give-and-go types propel the ball around.
But neither does he seem to have the crystal clear convictions about his game that he always had at Aston Villa, where everything revolved around him.
His minutes per goal or assist ratio this season - 317.6 - compares with Ilkay Gundogan’s 188.1 and is even inferior to that of Cole Palmer, a 19-year-old, and Fernandinho, a 37-year-old who barely plays.
Grealish's shot was athletically cleared off the line by Real full back Ferland Mendy (left) late on
The clearance just missed Phil Foden, who was inches away from tapping it into an empty net
It’s hard to avoid the sense that there’s some imposter syndrome at play here. Despite, that raffish exterior and the rather too cultivated hair, Grealish’s discussion in several recent interviews has given the impression of someone trying desperately to fit in among the superstars he doesn’t entirely consider
