Doesn’t Jude Bellingham deserve our support?

At just 21 years of age, he has won La Liga and the UEFA Champions League. He scored an overhead kick at the European championships for goodness sake. And yet still, some are so desperate to see him fail. It is a poor look for the British sporting culture that so many are quick to vilify such a young man for a string of mediocre performances in a struggling Real Madrid team.

It has happened before. Wayne Rooney was so often the poster boy of England defeats despite being the highest performer in a relatively poor England team. David Beckham often took headlines for all the wrong reasons – particularly after his incident with Diego Simeone – but he was able to recover to become a media darling once more. Even that might be problematic, perhaps our highs are too high and our lows too low. We have a habit of expecting our world class players to perform miracles – when they do, we rejoice, but when they don’t, we get angry.

England head to the Olympic stadium in Athens tomorrow evening with a young squad. Morgan Rogers of Aston Villa and Curtis Jones of Liverpool have been called up to cover in the midfield after a smattering of withdrawals. Bellingham is younger than both, but he is a veteran of 38 caps. It is right to expect him to shoulder some responsibility, but let’s not pile on if the team falls short of expectations.

A classy midfielder, Bellingham has the game to become one of the world’s best. Comparisons to the great Zinedine Zidane are not unwarranted. Athletic, two-footed, skilful, he has all of the attributes, as they say. Occasionally, he can be guilty of trying too hard to make things happen which can lead to loss of possession. A symptom of his youth? Maybe. I prefer to think of it as an exuberance for attack. We shouldn’t be so quick to criticise our players for attempting creativity.

It is unlikely that Bellingham will be low on confidence – he has already demonstrated enormous self-belief in his short career. The sort of self-belief that leads you to grabbing the Slovakia game by the scruff of the neck. Perhaps he is a little protected from the English press in Spain, although MARCA can be pretty savage themselves. They recently described him as ‘a shadow of his former self’, albeit going on to suggest that that was more a symptom of the system they are playing at Real Madrid. Nonetheless, he may just need a metaphorical arm round the shoulder once in a while.

Jude Bellingham is already one of our best players. And he’s only going to get better. Let’s help him along the way.

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By Leon Parrott