An Ode to Phil Jones, Football's Gurning, Well-Meaning Stuntman

The magnificent clumsiness of Manchester United's least cultured centre-back.

by Ben Machell

May 22, 2015, 4:30pm

Peak Phil Jones (Photo via Instagram)

With their Champions League places already secured, last Sunday saw Manchester United and Arsenal play-out a largely meaningless 1-1 draw at Old Trafford. It was not exactly a classic. Ander Herrera scored for the hosts in the first half, Tyler Blackett gifted the visitors an own-goal in the second, and that was more or less that. We wouldn't even still be talking about it now were it not for a single incident in the 22nd minute, a brief moment of perfect bathos after all the Super Sunday hype.

You probably know what's coming. A ball was clipped forward and Arsenal's Olivier Giroud made a run in behind Phil Jones, who was badly wrong-footed and yet, despite falling to the ground, managed to squirm-cum-crawl his way across the turf and clear the ball with his head at the very last second. It looked fucking ridiculous. In slow-motion, it looked even funnier, exacerbated by the Manchester United defender's now increasingly familiar "I've just dropped acid on a ghost train" facial expression and Total Wipeout contestant poise.

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Predictably, the Footy-Banter Industrial Complex seized upon it. You could immediately imagine the faceless drones charged with running the social media accounts of online bookmakers all desperately trying to work out how to photoshop the 23-year-old to look like a floundering salmon or WWE wrestler or whatever. Gary Neville, commentating on the game, actually began to giggle. "He's trying too hard," said Martin Keown. "It becomes almost comical. He's almost like a stuntman." Even Giroud seemed to crack a rueful grin. Everyone – not for the first time – was laughing at Phil Jones.

It's a sobering thing, to see a once-feted youngster slowly become a figure of fun. The question is, how did this happen? And is it too late for him to do anything about it? Looking back, his career could not have begun more promisingly. When he made his debut for Blackburn Rovers in 2010, he was immediately handed the job of man-marking Didier Drogba. "I nearly dropped to the floor," he later said upon finding out he would be starting against Chelsea, a response that actually isn't too hard to believe. This was basically Sam Allardyce asking him: "Can you swing a sack of doorknobs?", a test of manhood that the 18-year-old passed comfortably. To be honest, judging by the size of him, he could probably have marked Drogba when he was a still a kid. Seriously, look at him. I bet he smelt like a tuck shop.

Anyway, this physicality has always been a double-edged sword. While it means he'll never be raggy-dolled by Drogba, it also means he may one day kill Adam Lallana dead. Jones doesn't even particularly look like a footballer. He has the fat rosy face of a Morrisons deli counter attendant and the corned-beef physique of a man who, by rights, should really be making solid yards for Warrington or St Helens or Widnes in Super League. In fact, the more you watch him play, the more you wonder if there genuinely was some kind of mix-up when he was a kid, and his mum accidentally dropped him off at the Blackburn Rovers academy rather than at Wigan Warriors – only by the time it was all eventually ironed out, Sir Alex Ferguson had already been like, "Fuck it, I'll give you £16.5m for him," so everyone had to just sort of keep quiet about it.

What's he like as a bloke? Seriously, your guess is as good as mine. From what I can gather he likes golf. He likes Game of Thrones. The most compromising photo to emerge of him to date involves him eating a chicken wing on the street before entering something called "The Boogie Bus", a sort of small coach filled with disco lights that school kids in Manchester hire for their graduations. Presumably you're not allowed to eat chicken wings inside it. You know if it had been, say, Wayne Rooney, he'd have been wolfing chicken wings inside the Boogie Bus whatever. I suppose what I'm saying is that Jones strikes you as a bit more demure than your average player. He looks like someone who would chuckle awkwardly if you were to show him a copy of FHM at break time.

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Whatever. Back to football. He won a title at Man U in his second season. "I remember Rio getting the champagne, turning round and squirting it straight in my eye," he says. "But I didn't mind." There is something beautifully Phil Jones about that. Fabio Capello compared him to Italy legend Franco Baresi, yet while it is often said of the very best defenders that you never really notice them make a tackle, Jones was unequivocal when asked what his favourite part of the game was.

"Tackling."

Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with defenders who like to tackle. It's just that it has gradually become clear that Jones sometimes likes to tackle the same way that your mate you play 5-a-side with likes to tackle… the shortsighted one who insists in playing in pumps and who also just feels really angry with how his life has panned-out. You wonder if, in his head, Jones has constructed a narrative of himself as the hardy tussler, the full-blooded scrapper who lets you know you've been in a game. "Sometimes when you make a block, it's like scoring a goal," he has said, which apart from being total bullshit, suggests the kind of reactive, fire-fighting player who tends to spend the 90 minutes watching the ball and waiting to dive in. Despite being able to play at right-back and anchor the midfield, his favourite position is centre-back, "where you can see everything".

I know this sounds a bit like I'm telling a title-winning international defender how to do his job. If Phil Jones got in touch with me with advice on how to make jokes about Steve Bruce, I'm not entirely sure how I'd feel. It would be something to write about, I guess. I dunno. It's just that part of me wants him to do well, really well, and almost entirely on the grounds that he is just so obviously trying really hard. And it's an unusual thing, to look at a Premier League footballer and see that they're putting in loads of effort, physically and mentally. Normally, as the pundits say, they make it look easy. But Jones makes top-flight football look what it is, which is to say, really fucking difficult and nerve-wracking and with millions of people on-hand to laugh at you soon as you start doing The Worm in your own box. His Manchester United predecessor, Nemanja Vidic, was also a physically imposing defender, but the Serb always had the complacently menacing air of a soldier smoking a cigarette while watching you dig your own grave. Jones looks like the guy doing the digging. Half the time, he looks terrified.

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There are mitigating factors. It's not his fault, for example, that he and Chris Smalling have been paired as a sort of knock-off, market stall Vidic and Ferdinand, very much the Gobots to the latter's Transformers. He's had his share of injuries – although, thinking about it, maybe he'd have less if he just cut-down on the body-slams – and it should also be acknowledged that defenders are not well served by the way we increasingly consume our football highlights. Vine loops and gifs of mad skills are great PR for forwards but as a rule, clips of steady, well-organised, compact defending do not go viral (although, speaking for myself, there must be a market for that?). But moments of slapstick – slide whistle, banjo lick stuff – obviously do. It's an inbuilt bias, and once you've got a rep for pulling weird faces while playing, every single thing you do on the pitch is going to be mercilessly scrutinised. It's like school. It's all too easy to imagine Raheem Sterling putting his hand over his mouth, pointing and screeching at everyone to look while Jones goes really red. Which only makes things worse.

But there's every reason to think that Jones will get through this sticky patch and blossom into the self-assured Victorian strongman he has always promised to become. He is still, crucially, young – and besides, maybe everyone has been a little hysterical in their desire to cast him as a gurning lunk. Earlier this month, something called the CIES Football Observatory in Switzerland ranked Jones the best centre back in Europe who was under the age of 23 and who had played in at least 50 percent of their side's games. They must have felt like you do when you spend ages filling-out one of those "What's your political compass?" questionnaires, and it comes back saying you're basically Josef Goebbels. But at least they stuck by him and published their findings rather than going back and re-doing it all. And in a way, that's what United are doing, too. Yes: he sometimes walks around the pitch like the lad who ruins the entire stag do by getting kicked out of not one but three nightclubs. But there is truth to Jones' game. There is honesty in his unique "on the floor, sideways header" school of defending. In an era of pixieish attacking players refusing £100,000 paydays, Jones stands solid in the United back line, like a golem summoned from the stone beneath the turf, like a man who still sends his grandma a handwritten note each Christmas to thank her for the shower gel set, gurning away, falling over himself like his limbs were made of hurdles. And how can you not like that?

@ben_machell