Compare them to other promoted sides: Wolves might be the best team ever to come up, but really that was never a Championship squad. We laugh, but Wilder probably is the manager of the season. Only the steel town Coach Carter himself, Wild Thing Wilder. Who else could it be? What other manager could master this ship of scoundrels and blaggards, this platoon of pretty boys and ruffnecks. The name of Jack Grealish might well go down in the same annals as Bowles, Marsh, Le Tis et al but something tells me he’s probably alright with that – if it means he can still go to Pryzm every now and again. He is that club, but to the point where he seems to have made himself almost unbuyable. In the court of Aston Villa, Grealish is king, knight, jester and judge. To imagine Villa without him doesn’t bear thinking about, to call him a talisman would be borderline insulting. After being punched in the head by a derby-day nutter last season and being photographed pavement pissed in Tenerife early in his career, he upped the the stakes during lockdown crashing his Range Rover into two parked cars and apologising for it with all the sincerity of a boyband star getting nabbed with a spliff.

Since day one of the season, he’s been kicked mercilessly, won games single-handedly, scored, created, destroyed. His return to the top table has been every bit as manic and controversial as we could have hoped for.

The first name on this lunatic team sheet Jack “Greazy” Grealish, the shinpad-sceptic sex symbol with a hairdo like a Monte Carlo widow’s dog, the joyriding, balloon-huffing, positionless Peaky Blinder with legs like Spanish hams.

Authentic footballers martin