Jack Harrison is just a footballer
He's a football player and that's very different to being a football supporter and, refreshingly if you want it to be, Harrison doesn't try to blur the lines.
Jack Harrison is just a footballer. It should be a relief. You don't have to worry about him. You don't really need to think about him, although a lot of people do, and not always kindly. But if you take him for what he is, he can be a calming break from the hyperactive disgust much of modern football can cause. Because he's just a footballer, in the best old fashioned way.
Which makes him the worst person around for modern football. This summer has been dominated by Newcastle fans' anger at Alexander Isak for loudly wanting to go to Liverpool, and Brentford fans' anger at Yoane Wissa for loudly wanting to go to Newcastle, and Liverpool fans' anger at Trent Alexander-Arnold for wanting to go to Real Madrid at the wrong time for the wrong fee. At issue, in each case, was loyalty, and a player unwilling to put everything into playing for a team that fans want them to.
This anger has come for Jack Harrison too, now he's back at Leeds after two seasons on loan with Everton, but it's misplaced. For some fans, the problem with Harrison is not that he won't give everything for their team. It's that he'll give everything for any team, and that's also seen as disloyal.
But, disloyal to what? Harrison has never been a demonstrative badge-kissing player signalling his passion to the crowd. Sometimes, when he should be celebrating a goal, he seems curiously inert. In the Bielsa era that was often because he'd scored it at the end of sixty yards or more of sprinting and didn't have any energy left for fist-pumping.
Harrison plays with a loyalty that I've read Mick Hennigan saying Howard Wilkinson valued most in his players: loyalty to task. He won't kiss the badge and make a show of his passion, but if he's given a job to do for your team he'll do it the best he can.
He's a football player and that's very different to being a football supporter and, refreshingly if you want it to be, Harrison doesn't try to blur the lines. Does he feel the same passion and belonging as a fan on the terraces who feels like they live or die for their team? No. But he doesn't pretend to. He loves football because of footballers and playing football and wanted to make being a footballer his life. He has never wanted to be a fan or seem like one.
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