He plays like he's 7 years older. Massively impressed with the lad.
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Tom Davies
- Thread starter sageyefc
- Start date
- Status
I enjoyed his performance today, and while it wasn't as headlinegrabbing as last week , overall it was as good even without the goal. You can see little things in his game that have been there at youth level which he's starting to bring to the PL - and you're never really sure if a talented youngster can do that step up. There was one point when he was marking a CP player with the ball and the opponent tried to feint/dummy him into diving in but he just stood still and kept his space. Maybe nothing , but many an 18 yr old would have dived in and be left on his arse . In his first few appearances this season he did the basics very well, when he received the ball he would usually pass it back or sideways in the direction he was facing, nice and simple. Now when he receives the ball he knows what his options are and is confident enough to turn and move off in the opposite direction if that's the best option, and drive the ball forward.
Mark Pembridge
Player Valuation: £1m
What a prospect we have on our hands. He has a football brain this kid
PeregrineT
Player Valuation: £35m
Hes awfully hard to take out of the lineup now. If you look at just the last 2 games, hes had a goal, an assist, and set up one other goal with a sweet pass in to Kev. He has created 3 of our 5 goals.
gonetomorrow
Player Valuation: £70m
He has to start every week now. He's the bit of magic we lacked before.
RFUS
Anustart
It's like having 12 men on the pitch with him. Forget Barkley comparisons, he's what we always wanted James McCarthy to be. Pressing and snapping to get the ball back, covering and heading it off the line, but then with the vision to set up goals and even the skill to finish as well.
It's early days so I don't want to get carried away, but he's looking like a top drawer box to box mid. Reminds me of fellaini when he was at his absolute best. Having a player like that goes such a long way in dominating a football match.
kiss the crest
Player Valuation: £35m
We all agree Tom Davies is magic
Top class performance from him today never tired just the midfielder we needed simple through balls he can even get better!
Not as far I'm aware I was talking to him at a dinner event last year and we had a brief chat about Dowell. He really rates him.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
Apologies if posted before, but very interesting article giving a little more insight into Davies, from the Times.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a...7?shareToken=fc4b1d9c7b07e2564f1e7b5ed5c7ed7c
‘After my goal I went home and watched telly with mum and dad’
Three days after announcing his arrival on the Premier League stage in such spectacular fashion, Tom Davies is back in the classroom, just around the corner from Goodison Park. He is there, at Everton Free School, to promote the Merseyside club’s community work. A teacher gives him a maths paper to look over. No problem. “If I hadn’t become a footballer, I probably would have gone to uni,” the 18-year-old says later. “I might have done maths. Or science, maybe.”
The excited mood in the classroom means that an English lesson ends up as a question-and-answer session with Davies and Ademola Lookman, the new teenage signing from Charlton Athletic, who also scored his first Everton goal in the stunning 4-0 victory over Manchester City on Sunday. The students ask how it felt; amazing, they say. One of them asks Davies where he lives, perhaps expecting him to say the footballers’ enclaves of Formby or Southport, up the coast, or The Wirral. “West Derby,” he says, to their apparent surprise, a quiet suburb just three miles away in North Liverpool. “Are you stopping where you are or are you going to move to one of them big houses?” he is asked. “No, I’m stopping where I am,” Davies replies with a smile.
Maybe I’m not your average footballer, but it’s who I am. It’s about being comfortable in your own skin
Whatever preconceptions you might have about the “stereotypical” young English footballer, the England Under-19 captain shatters them. It is not just the way he looks — the rolled-down socks, the floppy hair, the wispy beard or the collection of hats and jackets that have always drawn quizzical looks in the Everton dressing room from players and coaches alike. It is not even the fact that his preference, when asked whether he might like to buy a first car, was for “nothing flash” or that last summer, at the end of his first season as a professional, he and two of his fellow academy graduates eschewed the usual footballer fleshpots to travel to the Amalfi Coast, Rome and Lake Como. No, it is more his general demeanour — coolly assured on the pitch, fiercely committed to improvement on the training ground, refreshingly, delightfully humble off the pitch.
After his tour of the school, which Everton opened in 2012 as part of their commitment to their local community, Davies sits down to be interviewed. We start by talking about that goal, the one where he received the ball midway inside the Everton half, accelerated down the wing, tricked his way past Gaël Clichy and Yaya Touré, played a one-two with Ross Barkley and calmly dinked the ball over the advancing Claudio Bravo.
“It was all right,” the midfielder says with a laugh. “I’m just happy Rom [Romelu Lukaku] didn’t take it off me, to be honest.”
In the stands as well as on the pitch, the celebrations at the Gwladys Street End were full of joy, recognition of a special moment for a player who has been at Everton since the age of 11. “You could just tell the fans were so happy,” he says. “It’s a privilege for me to play in front of them. That’s why when I slid on my knees, I was thinking, ‘I need to get into the crowd here.’ I didn’t get booked. I think everyone had turned around to go back up the pitch and I sneaked in.
“At the end I just wanted to stay out there. It was an unbelievable feeling doing that for your hometown club, something I always dreamed of and wanted to do. You could tell in the dressing room how pleased the lads were for me and Ademola. I can’t put into words how proud I am of myself and thankful to everyone who helped me.”
To celebrate, Davies went out to a restaurant in the city centre with his family and his agent, Neil Sang. He was overwhelmed by the warmth shown towards him by supporters of Liverpool as well as Everton. “Yes, because it’s red and blue here,” he says. “Everyone you see, even on the Liverpool side, is coming up and telling me how proud they are. I think everyone just likes it when someone from the city does well. In any walk of life, you just want someone to do well.”
Watch Davies open his Everton account against Manchester City
Steven Gerrard, Robbie Fowler, Wayne Rooney, Ross Barkley and others might warn that there can also be a backlash against a local boy made good, but Davies is well aware that the life of a footballer will not always be plain sailing. “What I did at the weekend is unbelievable, but I know that’s not going to happen every week,” he says. “I’m just trying to be the best I can be.”
The message about keeping his feet on the ground has been drummed into him by Sang, by Everton manager Ronald Koeman, by his parents — his father works in the Jaguar factory at Halewood and his mother is a hairdresser — by his older brother Liam, who plays for non-League Burscough, and his uncle Alan Whittle, fondly remembered by Everton fans of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “We’ve spoken on the phone and he’s made up for me,” Davies says of Whittle. “He hopes I can go on to achieve what he did. He has told me a few stories about those days. It was a lot different to now.”
That is why the image of Davies returning to his parents’ house in West Derby on Sunday evening is such an appealing one. He jokes that: “I don’t think I’ve come down” from the high of that goal, but it is clear that he has. “We watched it [the match against City] when we got in,” he says. “It’s good to go home. It might sound strange when you’ve just been playing in front of all those people and then you come home and you’re watching the telly with your mum and dad, but it was just normal to me. I don’t know any different.”
In time, he will. His profile will grow, his earnings will increase and the spotlight will intensify, bringing different pressures both on and off the pitch. English football is full of kids who went from “next big thing” to obscurity. Davies is determined not to be another victim of that culture of “too much too soon”.
“The rewards for me are playing for Everton — and scoring,” he says. “I’ve always just wanted to play football and have days like Sunday. I know it’s a lot bigger now with the media and with social media, but it doesn’t bother me because it’s a chance to interact with a lot more fans. I don’t mind that. I like talking to people. You just have to learn to deal with it the way you feel comfortable.”
Feeling comfortable is essential to Davies, who has never sought to conform to stereotypes of how a footballer should look or act. “The other lads give me a bit of stick, but that’s just football,” he says. “I give people stick myself — nothing bad, but that’s just the way it goes. Unsy [David Unsworth, the Everton Under-23 coach] used to give me loads of stick for my music and my hair, always telling me to get it cut. It’s all a good laugh really.”
What happens if sponsors come along, demanding that he smartens up and has his hair cut? “Ha, no chance,” he says. “I started growing it a few years back, then got rid of it all and I missed it, so I’ve grown it back. To be honest, I don’t know why anyone would give me stick. I think mine [dress sense] is quite good. Maybe I’m not your average footballer, but it’s just who I am and what I’m like. It’s just about being comfortable in your own skin, really. On days like today [the school visit], that’s what you want — to help people. Just be good at what you do and be the person you want to be.” How does he unwind? “I love my music,” he says. “Just going into town with friends and family and being with them. I like going to gigs if there are any on. Kings of Leon are on at the Echo Arena [next month], so I’ll go and see them. And you can’t beat The Beatles for me. I’m trying to learn the guitar but I can’t get my fingers going.”
It sounds as though Leighton Baines would be his soulmate in the first-team dressing room. “Yeah, but Bainesy doesn’t like Kings of Leon,” Davies says. Too commercial? “Probably, yeah, though he does like the Arctic Monkeys.”
Davies’s best friends at Everton are Kieran Dowell and Harry Charsley, the second-year pros with whom he went to Italy last summer. “We wanted to make the best time off we had,” he says. “We just wanted to see the culture of Italy. It’s a part of the world I had never been to. It was nice, a bit of culture. We started on the Amalfi Coast, went to Capri, got the train to Rome, saw the Pope, the Colosseum, stuff like that, then we went on to Lake Como for a few nights. I loved it.”
They were not back-packing or slumming it. Even as teenagers, after one year on a professional contract, they could afford to treat themselves. Too much too young? The pampered generation, as Jamie Carragher, the former Liverpool defender, put it in a withering assessment of young English footballers last year? “The way the academies are now, you do get looked after a lot,” Davies says. “It’s good for your development, but it might be a bit too much at times. It’s just the way football is going.”
For many of his team-mates in the England under-19s, there is not yet a clear pathway towards first-team football. Of the squad who went to the Under-17 World Cup in Chile in November 2015, only Davies, who was captain, and Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool full back, have had even a fleeting taste of Premier League action to date.
“That was a great experience,” Davies says of the tournament in Chile. “We were disappointed to go out in the group stage, but it was definitely a great memory and it was great to experience that part of the world. There are some very good lads in that squad. Reece Oxford was supposed to be there, but he got into the West Ham team at that time. This [Davies’s breakthrough] might be an inspiration to the other lads. It’s there for everyone to see. If I can do it, why can’t they?
“It has always been my dream to do what I did last Sunday. I did it, so it shows people dreams do come true. It shows you can achieve what you want to do. But I don’t want to think too much about what has been happening. I just have to keep the momentum going. If anything, this has made me want it more.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a...7?shareToken=fc4b1d9c7b07e2564f1e7b5ed5c7ed7c
‘After my goal I went home and watched telly with mum and dad’
Three days after announcing his arrival on the Premier League stage in such spectacular fashion, Tom Davies is back in the classroom, just around the corner from Goodison Park. He is there, at Everton Free School, to promote the Merseyside club’s community work. A teacher gives him a maths paper to look over. No problem. “If I hadn’t become a footballer, I probably would have gone to uni,” the 18-year-old says later. “I might have done maths. Or science, maybe.”
The excited mood in the classroom means that an English lesson ends up as a question-and-answer session with Davies and Ademola Lookman, the new teenage signing from Charlton Athletic, who also scored his first Everton goal in the stunning 4-0 victory over Manchester City on Sunday. The students ask how it felt; amazing, they say. One of them asks Davies where he lives, perhaps expecting him to say the footballers’ enclaves of Formby or Southport, up the coast, or The Wirral. “West Derby,” he says, to their apparent surprise, a quiet suburb just three miles away in North Liverpool. “Are you stopping where you are or are you going to move to one of them big houses?” he is asked. “No, I’m stopping where I am,” Davies replies with a smile.
Maybe I’m not your average footballer, but it’s who I am. It’s about being comfortable in your own skin
Whatever preconceptions you might have about the “stereotypical” young English footballer, the England Under-19 captain shatters them. It is not just the way he looks — the rolled-down socks, the floppy hair, the wispy beard or the collection of hats and jackets that have always drawn quizzical looks in the Everton dressing room from players and coaches alike. It is not even the fact that his preference, when asked whether he might like to buy a first car, was for “nothing flash” or that last summer, at the end of his first season as a professional, he and two of his fellow academy graduates eschewed the usual footballer fleshpots to travel to the Amalfi Coast, Rome and Lake Como. No, it is more his general demeanour — coolly assured on the pitch, fiercely committed to improvement on the training ground, refreshingly, delightfully humble off the pitch.
After his tour of the school, which Everton opened in 2012 as part of their commitment to their local community, Davies sits down to be interviewed. We start by talking about that goal, the one where he received the ball midway inside the Everton half, accelerated down the wing, tricked his way past Gaël Clichy and Yaya Touré, played a one-two with Ross Barkley and calmly dinked the ball over the advancing Claudio Bravo.
“It was all right,” the midfielder says with a laugh. “I’m just happy Rom [Romelu Lukaku] didn’t take it off me, to be honest.”
In the stands as well as on the pitch, the celebrations at the Gwladys Street End were full of joy, recognition of a special moment for a player who has been at Everton since the age of 11. “You could just tell the fans were so happy,” he says. “It’s a privilege for me to play in front of them. That’s why when I slid on my knees, I was thinking, ‘I need to get into the crowd here.’ I didn’t get booked. I think everyone had turned around to go back up the pitch and I sneaked in.
“At the end I just wanted to stay out there. It was an unbelievable feeling doing that for your hometown club, something I always dreamed of and wanted to do. You could tell in the dressing room how pleased the lads were for me and Ademola. I can’t put into words how proud I am of myself and thankful to everyone who helped me.”
To celebrate, Davies went out to a restaurant in the city centre with his family and his agent, Neil Sang. He was overwhelmed by the warmth shown towards him by supporters of Liverpool as well as Everton. “Yes, because it’s red and blue here,” he says. “Everyone you see, even on the Liverpool side, is coming up and telling me how proud they are. I think everyone just likes it when someone from the city does well. In any walk of life, you just want someone to do well.”
Watch Davies open his Everton account against Manchester City
Steven Gerrard, Robbie Fowler, Wayne Rooney, Ross Barkley and others might warn that there can also be a backlash against a local boy made good, but Davies is well aware that the life of a footballer will not always be plain sailing. “What I did at the weekend is unbelievable, but I know that’s not going to happen every week,” he says. “I’m just trying to be the best I can be.”
The message about keeping his feet on the ground has been drummed into him by Sang, by Everton manager Ronald Koeman, by his parents — his father works in the Jaguar factory at Halewood and his mother is a hairdresser — by his older brother Liam, who plays for non-League Burscough, and his uncle Alan Whittle, fondly remembered by Everton fans of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “We’ve spoken on the phone and he’s made up for me,” Davies says of Whittle. “He hopes I can go on to achieve what he did. He has told me a few stories about those days. It was a lot different to now.”
That is why the image of Davies returning to his parents’ house in West Derby on Sunday evening is such an appealing one. He jokes that: “I don’t think I’ve come down” from the high of that goal, but it is clear that he has. “We watched it [the match against City] when we got in,” he says. “It’s good to go home. It might sound strange when you’ve just been playing in front of all those people and then you come home and you’re watching the telly with your mum and dad, but it was just normal to me. I don’t know any different.”
In time, he will. His profile will grow, his earnings will increase and the spotlight will intensify, bringing different pressures both on and off the pitch. English football is full of kids who went from “next big thing” to obscurity. Davies is determined not to be another victim of that culture of “too much too soon”.
“The rewards for me are playing for Everton — and scoring,” he says. “I’ve always just wanted to play football and have days like Sunday. I know it’s a lot bigger now with the media and with social media, but it doesn’t bother me because it’s a chance to interact with a lot more fans. I don’t mind that. I like talking to people. You just have to learn to deal with it the way you feel comfortable.”
Feeling comfortable is essential to Davies, who has never sought to conform to stereotypes of how a footballer should look or act. “The other lads give me a bit of stick, but that’s just football,” he says. “I give people stick myself — nothing bad, but that’s just the way it goes. Unsy [David Unsworth, the Everton Under-23 coach] used to give me loads of stick for my music and my hair, always telling me to get it cut. It’s all a good laugh really.”
What happens if sponsors come along, demanding that he smartens up and has his hair cut? “Ha, no chance,” he says. “I started growing it a few years back, then got rid of it all and I missed it, so I’ve grown it back. To be honest, I don’t know why anyone would give me stick. I think mine [dress sense] is quite good. Maybe I’m not your average footballer, but it’s just who I am and what I’m like. It’s just about being comfortable in your own skin, really. On days like today [the school visit], that’s what you want — to help people. Just be good at what you do and be the person you want to be.” How does he unwind? “I love my music,” he says. “Just going into town with friends and family and being with them. I like going to gigs if there are any on. Kings of Leon are on at the Echo Arena [next month], so I’ll go and see them. And you can’t beat The Beatles for me. I’m trying to learn the guitar but I can’t get my fingers going.”
It sounds as though Leighton Baines would be his soulmate in the first-team dressing room. “Yeah, but Bainesy doesn’t like Kings of Leon,” Davies says. Too commercial? “Probably, yeah, though he does like the Arctic Monkeys.”
Davies’s best friends at Everton are Kieran Dowell and Harry Charsley, the second-year pros with whom he went to Italy last summer. “We wanted to make the best time off we had,” he says. “We just wanted to see the culture of Italy. It’s a part of the world I had never been to. It was nice, a bit of culture. We started on the Amalfi Coast, went to Capri, got the train to Rome, saw the Pope, the Colosseum, stuff like that, then we went on to Lake Como for a few nights. I loved it.”
They were not back-packing or slumming it. Even as teenagers, after one year on a professional contract, they could afford to treat themselves. Too much too young? The pampered generation, as Jamie Carragher, the former Liverpool defender, put it in a withering assessment of young English footballers last year? “The way the academies are now, you do get looked after a lot,” Davies says. “It’s good for your development, but it might be a bit too much at times. It’s just the way football is going.”
For many of his team-mates in the England under-19s, there is not yet a clear pathway towards first-team football. Of the squad who went to the Under-17 World Cup in Chile in November 2015, only Davies, who was captain, and Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool full back, have had even a fleeting taste of Premier League action to date.
“That was a great experience,” Davies says of the tournament in Chile. “We were disappointed to go out in the group stage, but it was definitely a great memory and it was great to experience that part of the world. There are some very good lads in that squad. Reece Oxford was supposed to be there, but he got into the West Ham team at that time. This [Davies’s breakthrough] might be an inspiration to the other lads. It’s there for everyone to see. If I can do it, why can’t they?
“It has always been my dream to do what I did last Sunday. I did it, so it shows people dreams do come true. It shows you can achieve what you want to do. But I don’t want to think too much about what has been happening. I just have to keep the momentum going. If anything, this has made me want it more.”
You know how everyone's on about doubting the actual age of african players in what is at best social commentary about the sorry state of underdelevoped countries, or at worst, thinly veiled racism? Well, i'd like to do the opposite of Davies. Lad can't be that young, first because of that lovely facial hair, and also because he plays like an educated man. Love it.
He hit a pass today, with the outside of the boot from our half, into about 2 inches away from Rom, on the run on the edge of the Palace box - majestic stuff.
I understand what you're saying but I'm talking from the start of this season, what happens after that would in my opinion of been quite different. To be fair you're also ignoring the fact that Lennon, Kone, Valencia etc have been playing really poorly but have still had opportunities.
Personally I hope he goes on loan but it will be important to send him to the right club/manager.
What about that 40 yarder to Ross
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