Curtis Jones: Being the local boy at Liverpool adds pressure – but I am up for the challenge

From the yard of Curtis Jones’ old primary school, you can see the stone Liver Birds on the Royal Liver Building peeking over the top of the new Hilton Hotel and, should you turn in the opposite direction, the gothic tower of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral.

We are in the L1 postcode, the heart of the city and the neighbourhood in which Liverpool’s homegrown attacking midfielder par excellence grew up. “I always joke with Trent [Alexander-Arnold] that I’m a real Scouser: I’m L1,” Jones says. “That’s the roots of Liverpool. You cannot be any more Liverpool. I’m proud to come from a place like this.”

He is at St Vincent de Paul primary to drop off some new footballs and catch up with his former teachers. He has also personally covered the cost of the children’s sports equipment for the new school year. But we are here mainly because he felt that it was an appropriate location for his first major interview with a national publication – to give us a little taste of where he is from.

He is Liverpool’s ultimate local lad, who grew up just a short walk from the Royal Albert Dock and the Cavern Club, and all the other places – aside from football – that make the city famous. He is a confident, engaging young man who had a meteoric rise as a teenager. He also returns often to his core mantra – that elite football is tough, and finding your place takes a great deal of devotion.

“There had been a lot of talk around me since I was a kid,” he says. “Expectation has always been high. I manage it well and I understand that it is not always going to be an easy ride. I know there are going to be bumps and knocks. I am a kid who is willing to take it on. I enjoy the whole thing. I understand the stuff that has been spoken about – the bad and the good. I go out there and be me all the time. The position I am in now – I can show the real me. I am just trying to be at the point where I am playing all the games and being consistent. Scoring more goals and assisting.”

He had a fearsome end to last season when he put together a run of 12 games and scored three. Then on to the summer when he was a leading light in England Under-21s European championship win, the country’s first at that level since 1984. He made his first team debut for Liverpool aged 17. He scored the winning goal in a Merseyside derby aged 18. But he has also been unlucky with injury, and – at 22 – he feels the time is now for him to show the world what he can do.

“Yeah all that is good, but I want more,” he says. “I have always known [as a junior international] when I played against them [other European sides] as a younger player that I am above that. Now you are talking about the Euros where it’s the best players from 18 to 22. Without me trying to sound like I’m too good, it’s the level I always knew I was above. I enjoyed the Under-21s and our [England] team were [players] in their clubs’ first teams. But now I want to be in finals of the Champions League and the World Cup and winning the Premier League more. That’s the level I see myself at.”

He was a Liverpool prodigy from a young age, spotted by the club aged six, as his school team coach Ian Hastie reminds him when they reminisce. At Liverpool’s academy he was pushed up the age groups to play alongside older boys. “I had always been a kid who had done well,” he says. “People on the outside were like, ‘Oh, he’s 15 and now he’s with the Under-16s. Now he’s playing in the Under-18s. [Steven] Gerrard is his coach’. I got to the first team and I wasn’t hidden but the talk wasn’t as much.”

In other words, that steep rise slowed as he adjusted to winning a place in a Jurgen Klopp side that would become European and then Premier League champions in quick succession.

“The pressure that came with it – I used that to better myself. I did more gym. I ran. I knew that I could show everybody me on the pitch. As a kid they hadn’t seen me play. I would be telling everyone ‘Oh yeah I scored [in training]’, but I got to the point where they didn’t know anymore. They just knew I was with the first team. I guess everybody thought, ‘He can’t be that good because he’s not playing games’. I always had that in the back of my head. I knew what I had to do to play more games.”

We have arrived quickly at the subject of being the Scouser in a Liverpool team and not just any team – the best the club have had in 30 years. It brings with it a unique pressure. Liverpool could be said to be the biggest global brand in football that is, by the same measure an intensely local club. Every supporter in the city feels like they have a stake in it, and the local-born player can be the conductor for that. Jones is two first team appearances away from 100. He and Alexander-Arnold are the first homegrown stars to reach that number since Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Michael Owen.

As Klopp himself has said in the past, “people fancy big transfers” and there is a notion that there is always a better option than the academy boy. Yet, Jones was one of six England players – and two Liverpudlians – named in Uefa’s team of the Euros tournament this summer. Is there really a Spanish, German or Italian peer ahead of him?

He is philosophical rather than resentful about that pressure. “I feel it as well,” he says. “I won’t say [we get] the blame but I do feel sometimes because I am a local boy there can be a feeling of ‘He’s not good enough, we need to bring someone else in’. It’s the situation I’m in and I can’t change it. I don’t shy away from it. I am up for the challenge. If anyone is to doubt me, you will only see more of me. It’s not that I am out there to prove them wrong. The biggest thing I do is to prove myself right.”

Yet he is also well-aware he is, in his words, “living the dream”. His former PE teacher, Peter Allen, has an Anfield season ticket in the Centenary Stand and loves watching his old pupil play. Jones’ former teaching assistant Mel Wenton reminds him that she still has videos of him performing songs in school assembly. It is heartening to watch them chat about how an inner-city school, doing its best in often challenging circumstances, has launched the career of an elite footballer.

Much has changed at Liverpool since last season with the unexpected departures of Jordan Henderson and Fabinho. Jones sees himself very much as a No 8 in the truest sense – an attacking, disruptive midfielder. There is no doubt that the midfield is very much up for grabs now, even with the arrival of three new signings and now Ryan Gravenberch on his way from Bayern Munich.

“Things can always change,” he says, “but I feel there is more of a gap [in the team]. I back myself. I could have anybody competing with me – five lads, ten lads – and I have the same thing in my head. I train with them all the time. I see them play. I know what they have to give but I know how much I have to give and I still have time. I have to be the best in the position I am in. I have to prove all the time I am good enough keep my shirt.”

The effect on him of some injuries – random in their nature – have been underestimated. Last season he was diagnosed, after the Community Shield, with what the specialists called a “stress response” in the ankle and shin area of his right leg. Had he continued playing it would have developed into a fracture and then a break. “A strange one because there were times when I felt I could play but when they checked on the scan it still wasn’t right,” Jones says. “I just want to play. Any sort of pain to me – it’s fine, I will play. As long as I know it won’t lead to a bigger thing.”

A finger accidentally thrust into his eye during training in November 2021 caused serious damage and required careful treatment that prevented him from doing any more than stretching for weeks, so as to protect the healing process. In his first week in training this season he slid in for a block and had a ball smashed so hard at his foot that the ankle was extended. But he is fit again now and ready to win a place in the team.

Outside of football he remains very close to his older brother– “there is just 13 months difference, we’re like twins” – and his mum. Both have their own busy lives. His brother is a joiner and his mum works, as she always has, as a carer. Curtis has offered to support her but, he says with a shrug, she just refuses to give up work. His mum would take him to training every day as a child. “If it wasn’t for them,” he says, “I wouldn’t be where I am.”

He is fit again and available for Sunday’s game against Aston Villa. He has a Premier League winners’ medal already and the Euros medal from the summer. He looks out at the school yard and tells me that he spent just as much time out there playing basketball and cricket as he did football. As a child, he taught himself basketball watching the NBA on television and now says, with a wink, there is no-one at the training ground who can get close to his levels.

His self-belief is not to be doubted. But you need it to get where he has, and it is always qualified by one promise – that this footballer is prepared to do the work. “As a kid I have always had my head on. I know I am good enough to be first team in any team. But it came to the point where I really knew I had a chance around 16. That’s when a different type of me just came out. I saw my goal and what I had to do. I will always say until my last game that I still have more to give.”