Kalvin Phillips looked like he could arrive in Italy last January. Instead, Juventus chose different options – going for Carlos Alcaraz – and the midfielder went to West Ham, without however managing to improve their position, on the contrary. So much so that he lost his place in the national team, thus skipping the European Championship in Germany. The choice in the summer was to go to Ipswich, a newly promoted club, to try to get back the one who had earned the call from Manchester City, only to then almost never be taken into consideration.
Phillips spoke about the Pep Guardiola issue in recent days. “At City, you can train with the best players every single day, but if you don’t play football every day, it’s difficult to stay fit, it’s difficult to maintain self-confidence.”
“When there are moments when you feel like you could play and the coach decides to take a different path, it hurts a bit. The more I didn’t play, the less confident I was, the less fit I was. I just wanted to get that feeling back Sometimes I felt like I lost a little fire inside to compete, but since I’ve been here, and even in the pre-season when I played a lot of minutes, I’ve found that fire again and made the decision to come here to play. football and go back to enjoying what I do.” Kalvin Phillips turns 29 today.