tracked the Gallagher boys. Someone
said about the lad at Chelsea being
Jake’s brother and it changed my
mentality because Jake is hard as
nails. So is the other brother. I
thought, ‘Hold on, if he’s the younger
brother of those two then he’ll have a
bit about him.’ ”
Gallagher was a member of the
England Under-17 side that won the
World Cup in 2017 but was yet to
make an appearance in professional
football. Gallen had to convince Lee
Bowyer, Charlton’s then manager.“It was his first loan, in the
Championship, and it was a bit of a
gamble if I’m honest,” Bowyer says.
“You knew he had the quality but
could he handle the physicality?”
Gallagher made his debut the day
after joining Charlton. “I put him on
as a sub against Blackburn, first game
of the season, and once he got into
the side, and you could see what he
brought, his energy levels were
frightening,” Bowyer says.
This was the year in which
Chelsea’s academy flourished. Mason8 1GS Saturday December 18 2021 | the timesSport Football
Mount, Tammy Abraham, Fikayo
Tomori and James were brought into
the first team during Lampard’s first
season as head coach. Lampard,
Gallagher’s idol, rated him and sent a
message of encouragement during
the six months on loan at Swansea.
But Chelsea were not sure. “I don’t
think they knew where or what he
could go on to be,” Bowyer says.
“They wanted him to go on loan and
see. Sometimes on loan it’s either sink
or swim and, thankfully for Conor, he
started swimming. Now he’s
developed into this top-class player.”
The route to Selhurst Park began in
August 2019. The week after victory
away to Blackburn, Gallagher made
his full debut for Charlton at The
Valley where Dougie Freedman, the
Palace director of football, was in the
stands alongside Gallen. “It was Stoke
at home,” Gallen says. “To be fair to
Dougie, he said after only half an
hour, ‘Who the hell is that?’. On that
day, he said to me: ‘I’m having him.’ ”
Charlton lost Gallagher to Swansea
in January 2020. Steve Cooper, the
Swansea head coach, had been in
charge of England’s victorious under-
17s and was bringing Marc Guéhi,
Rhian Brewster, Freddie Woodman
and Gallagher to south Wales for
their Championship promotion push.
“Every day in training he would do
something a bit special but he was so
humble,” Dyer says. “We would be the
ones hyping about it and he would
just smile, laugh and carry on.”
Dyer was a senior player who
would offer advice. “I would always
tell him to shoot. He’d get into great
positions and sometimes he wouldn’t
pull the trigger. It was about having
that bit of self-belief.”
Gallagher’s first taste of the Premier
League was a painful one. He was set
to join Palace last year but ended up
with West Bromwich Albion, where a
battle against relegation was lost.
“He’s a winner and it hurts him, like
really hurts him, when you lose,”
Bowyer says. “Some lads now, you see
them walk off the pitch and you
think, ‘Are you really affected? Are
you going to have a sleepless night?’
In Conor’s case, yes.”
At Palace, Gallagher has combined
his attacking and defensive qualities.
Only Christian Norgaard, of
Brentford, and Stuart Dallas, of Leeds
United, have made more tackles
among midfielders this season.
Gallagher is yet to play a
professional game for Chelsea but the
anticipation of what he could achieve
is rising. “To get to where he is now,
that’s hunger,” Bowyer says. “That’s
not something given to you, you have
to fight for that.”From loan
ranger to the
‘new Kanté’
Conor Gallagher suffered growing pains (literally)
at Chelsea, but after four stints away he is looking
central to the club’s future, writes Tom Roddy
Gallagher has been one of the breakout stars of the Premier League season with
Palace, having previously had three loan spells at clubs including Charlton, insetDAN WEIR/PPAUK/SHUTTERSTOCKDecision day looms for transgender swimmers
Swimming’s international federation,
Fina, is to appoint a panel of experts
to develop a new policy on
transgender women competing in
female events after the emergence of
Lia Thomas.
The 22-year-old American college
swimmer raced for the men’s team at
the University of Pennsylvania
before transitioning, and now
competes as a woman after
undergoing a year’s testosteronetreatment. It has caused considerable
controversy as, although her times
have dropped from when she swam
as a man, she is winning races by a
distance and is threatening to beat
records set by Katie Ledecky, the
seven-times Olympic champion.
This is the first big test for Fina’s
new president, Husain Al Musallam,
with the federation putting together
a team of medical, legal and ethical
experts to advise on a new policy.There are three choices: to allow
transgender women to compete in
female events without restrictions; to
require lower testosterone levels; or
to make men’s swimming an open
category in which transgender
women can still compete. David
Grevemberg, who heads the Centre
for Sports and Human Rights,
suggested “staggered starts” in races
to allow trans athletes to compete,
but that is unlikely to be considered.Gulf in cup cash
The FA will find it increasingly hard
to defend the £25,000 prize money
for the women’s FA Cup winners (the
men get £1.8 million) given the
finalists do not receive gate receipts.
A surplus of about £500,000 came
from the 41,000 crowd at Chelsea’s
win over Arsenal this month.Crypto firm wants
to buy football club
Not content with persuading football
fans to spend their hard-earned cash
on buying memorabilia that exists
only online, one cryptocurrency
group is now looking to buy an
English football club.
WAGMI United has claimed it
wants to use cryptocurrency to buy
and run a club, generating income
by getting fans to buy the digital
memorabilia known as NFTs.Bradford City’s chairman, Stefan
Rupp, revealed he received an offer
out of the blue from WAGMI via
email on Thursday. “That’s all I
received, nothing more,” he said.
6 US equity firm Silver Lake has
bought a 33 per cent stake in the
Australian Professional League,
highlighting growing links with
Manchester City’s parent company
in football down under. Simon
Pearce, a City director, is one of five
APL directors. He is also the vice-
chairman of Melbourne City, whose
chairman is the City Football Group
chief, Khaldoon Al Mubarak.Happy new rear
The man behind the calendar
featuring 12 snaps of Jack Grealish’s
calves is planning a new one for
2022: with images of John McGinn’s
bottom. “We love the way he uses
his arse,” Kevin Beresford said of the
Aston Villa man’s habit of shielding
defenders with his backside.Minichiello in post
Toni Minichiello may have been
suspended by UK Athletics pending
an investigation into complaints by
female athletes, but he is still interim
chairman of British Basketball.
Minichiello had his run-ins with
athletics chiefs but has insisted he
never bullied those in his charge.SPORT
NOTEBOOK
Martyn Ziegler
Chief Sports Reporter
O
n a wall at Swansea City’s
Fairwood training centre
in south Wales, the
running statistics of
players would be put on
display during the 2019-20 season.
The purpose was to keep the squad
on their toes, to hold players to
account: who was working hardest
and who wasn’t? The answer to the
former question was always a familiar
name: Conor Gallagher.
“His work rate is insane,” Nathan
Dyer, the former Swansea forward,
tells The Times. “It’s one of the best
I’ve ever seen. He just doesn’t stop
and that was a massive thing for
Swansea, to have that kind of energy
to press from the front.”
Gallagher is now with Crystal
Palace. It is the 21-year-old’s fourth
loan spell away from Chelsea in two
years, yet it is in south London where
his career has gone to another level.
Gallagher made his England debut
against San Marino last month, and
he has been receiving plenty of
plaudits for his numbers in front of
goal. Patrick Vieira, the former
Arsenal midfielder now
manager at Palace, describes
him as a mix between Ray
Parlour and Frank
Lampard. Among top-
flight midfielders, only
Manchester City’s Bernardo
Silva has scored more goals
than Gallagher (six); only
Bruno Fernandes has created
more chances (29); and only
Ilkay Gundogan has a higher
expected-goals tally (4.34).
“He’s standing out because
of his goals and assists and
it’s making him the completepackage,” Dyer says. But the effort
and industry of Gallagher, shown
from the numbers on the wall at
Swansea, have always been there and
admired by managers. In the
corridors of Chelsea’s Cobham
training base, the head coach Thomas
Tuchel has been so impressed by
Gallagher’s energy that he is
understood to have compared him
with N’Golo Kanté.
It may surprise Tuchel to learn that
Chelsea were not always certain on
whether Gallagher would make the
step up from the club’s academy. Nor,
indeed, were his family. Gallagher
grew up in the Surrey village of Great
Bookham, a ten-minute drive from
Cobham, with his three older brothers
and parents, Lee and Samantha.
He had been spotted by Chelsea
playing alongside Reece James for
Epsom Eagles, aged six, and joined
the academy two years later. Growing
pains disrupted his development.
Gallagher’s knees ached and he
wasn’t playing as much. By the
age of 15, there was uncertainty
over whether he would
even be offered a
scholarship.
Charlton Athletic
was his first loan in
2019, secured by the
club’s director of football, Steve
Gallen, who had been following
the career of Gallagher’s eldest
brother, Jake. “I was QPR’s
youth team manager before.
We played against Millwall
every season and it was
always the toughest game
physically,” Gallen says.
“Jake was in their team for
a couple of years and I