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A Maverick Arrives at Bramley-Moore 💙

Plus, The Correspondent w/ Rory Smith has arrived.

Author

Rory Smith
August 14, 2025

The Maverick at Bramley-Moore Dock 💙

Rory Smith writes: There is a public image of Jack Grealish that, you sense, he is not in any great rush to change. It’s the one that was captured, almost too perfectly, in the photograph taken of him during the victory parade Manchester City staged the day after finally lifting the Champions League in 2023: Grealish standing on an open top bus, drenched and chiseled, his eyes closed and his arms outstretched, a Calvin Klein Jesus.

Grealish had been celebrating, by that stage, for several days. At one point, he had required the assistance of Kyle Walker to make sure he made the plane that was due to take City’s players from Ibiza back to Manchester so they could attend the parade.

He felt he had earned the right: that long-awaited European crown had followed yet another Premier League win, as well victory against Manchester United in the FA Cup final. He had been central to each and every one of those triumphs; he did not see any reason to apologize for enjoying himself.

“I’m living my dream of playing for the best club in the world, in my opinion,” he said. “We’ve just won the treble, so I’m obviously going to have a break now with my family and my friends. I’ll be raring to go again in four weeks.”

It was a measure of the affection in which Grealish was held – maybe the past tense is not necessary there; maybe he still is – that there was no sustained outrage to his merriment. Britain’s tabloid culture remains strong enough that any vaguely famous face captured looking even a little dazed and confused tends to be taken as an excuse for an outbreak of puckered, sententious moralizing. 

With Grealish, though, the roguishness has always been part of the charm. He is a recognizable character in English public life, something close to a tradition: the Jack-the-Lad, confident his cheeky grin and twinkling eyes will get him out of whatever scrapes might seem to follow him around. Grealish once – possibly playfully – responded to being asked to point to where he was born on a map by questioning whether he was, in fact, looking at England. It played as disarming rather than damning.