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One pundit reckons Aston Villa boss Steven Gerrard has the tools at hand to find ‘the next Jack Grealish’.

The England international, 26, spent eight years in Villa’s first team before leaving for Man City in the summer. The defending Premier League champions spent £100million to prize him away from his boyhood club.

Villa struggled without Grealish towards the start of the season. Their poor form saw Dean Smith sacked and replaced by Gerrard.

The West Midlands outfit have picked up 12 points from their last six Premier League games. That includes victories over Crystal Palace and Leicester.

Their most recent outing was a 2-0 win over Smith’s new club Norwich. Academy graduate Jacob Ramsey impressed and got on the scoresheet.

Fellow youngster Carney Chukwuemeka came off the bench and looked comfortable, too.

Pundit Frank McAvennie reckons this is an early sign that Gerrard is working his magic.

The former West Ham star told Football Insider: “There will be a rise in young talents at Villa. With Gerrard and [assistant manager Gary] McAllister there, they know a player when they see one. We saw that at Rangers.

“It makes sense and it makes sense to Gerrard. He came in young, he had that chance.

“Look at what he was doing in his late teens and his early 20s. He knows there are players out there who are capable of making that step up.

“They might have to wait for their chance but they will get it. That is a really exciting and amazing thing.

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“If they are good enough they will get a chance. We saw that the other night and those players backed him up. That next Jack Grealish is probably there, in the youth ranks somewhere.

“Gerrard has had a wonderful start to life at Villa, long may it continue. Villa deserve to be up there with a manager like Gerrard. He will make the right decisions and give chances to those players.”

Villa academy deserves credit – Gerrard

Following the victory over Norwich, Gerrard said: “It was a really strong away performance. I thought we controlled large parts of this game. We were difficult to play against and looked really dangerous.

“At 1-0 you always run the risk [of conceding] so it was nice to see Ollie finish it off.

“The academy deserves a lot of credit. We’ve some top coaches and we need to keep developing it as we want as many local home-grown players that we can have.

“It has been a challenging week. We lost one to injury, a couple to Covid and some members of staff as well.

“It’s been a positive start for me and we’ve started how we wanted to do and had some really tough games against [Manchester] City and Liverpool.”

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