Long Kalvin piece in The Times today. Lots about his father, which I didn’t know of before.. Interesting description of Armley in the screengrab. My dad was from there, some of family still live there, I went to primary school there. Not at all sure I’d describe it as ‘poverty-stricken’.
Here's the full piece:
Kalvin Phillips: When Dad gets out of prison I’ll make sure he stays out
_The Manchester City midfielder opens up to Paul Hirst on a hard first season at the Etihad and wanting his father to travel the world with him
As Kalvin Phillips was sitting in the waiting room at Wealstun Prison in May, thoughts started to race through his mind.
It was not the first time that Phillips had visited the Category C prison, which is a half-hour drive from Leeds. He went a few times in his teens to visit his dad, Mark, who has been incarcerated for much of his adult life for a series of drug-related and violent crimes.
The routine before going into the visiting hall was the same as ever. He was patted down by guards, sniffer dogs rubbed their noses at the pockets of his baggy gilet and he popped his mobile phone and car key into a locker which requires a £1 coin.
Those visits to the prison have started to become less frequent over the past few years.
“I think my dad feels like he doesn’t want to intrude on my life. I keep telling him he isn’t but once he gets summat in his head, he’s very hard to convince otherwise,” Phillips, 27, says.
The two speak over the phone now and then, but as he waited to enter the room on that day in May, questions still lingered in the back of Phillips’s mind about why his dad had been reluctant for his son to visit him. It was Phillips’s first visit in six years. “When you haven’t seen him for so long, you wonder: ‘Does he want to speak to me?’ Is it because of something he’s feeling?’ ”
In the end, the Manchester City and England midfielder had no reason to worry.
“As soon as I walked in, I saw my dad at the back of the room smiling and waving,” Phillips says. “He was like: ‘Come over here’. It was good to see that reaction. He’s got older but he’s still the same funny guy. And he is still my dad at the end of the day. I loved every second of it.”
After embracing, they sat on either side of a plastic table, and for 90 minutes they talked about life, family, Leeds United [Mark, like all of Phillips’s family, are diehard Leeds fans], Manchester City, and his son’s experience at the World Cup.
The only break in their chat came when Phillips headed to the confectionary stall.
“I wanted to get my dad a few chocolate bars that he’s not been able to have when he’s been inside,” Phillips says.
Phillips’s father was in and out of prison for much of his son’s childhood, so with a lot of help from his late and beloved grandmother Val, his gregarious mum Lindsay Crosby raised him and his three siblings in the poverty-stricken Leeds suburb of Armley.
In the upcoming Amazon documentary about Phillips’s life — Kalvin Phillips: The Road to City — his best friend, Liam Duggan, recalls seeing the player’s dad puffing on a cannabis joint at the side of the pitch as his son played youth-team football.
Phillips is not certain but he thinks that the last time his dad saw him play live was his second appearance for Leeds, a 2-1 home defeat by Cardiff City in 2015, in which the 19-year-old midfielder scored his first goal for the club.
Typically, given the warm-hearted character that Phillips is, he does not bear a grudge against his dad. Instead, he wants to do everything he can to stop him reoffending when he is released in two years’ time.
Phillips, right, made the decision to join Manchester City after consulting his family, a close-knit group who advise him on his career decisions
“I said that I wanted to help him be more stable when he gets out and make sure he doesn’t go back inside like he has done in the past,” Phillips says.
“He said to me: ‘All I want to do now is just travel the world and watch you play football’. And I said: ‘Well that’s summat I can help you with!’
“That would mean a lot to me because he has missed out on seeing me grow as a footballer and a person.”
In his dad’s absence, Phillips has been supported by a large yet close-knit group who have helped him make key decisions since he joined Leeds at the age of 14.
“I don’t think I can name them all, we’ll be here all day,” Phillips says with a smile, as he starts listing the group.
“There’s my mum, my girlfriend, my twin sister, my brother, my younger sister, my best mate Liam, and then a couple of other family members as well.”
Phillips trusts the group so much that he has effectively put his career in their hands. When Leeds accepted City’s £42 million bid for Phillips last summer, they all convened around his mum’s U-shaped sofa and voted on whether Phillips should move.
“All my decisions in football are based around my family,” he says. “Whatever the vote is, I will stick to that and go with that.
“Having good family and friends supporting me has helped me a lot.”
Phillips had to lean on his support network more than ever last season. He may have won the Treble and made his first appearance at a World Cup, but he only started two Premier League games — both of them dead rubbers with the title won — because of fierce competition from a world-class rival Rodri, an initial struggle to understand Pep Guardiola’s tactics, and injuries.
“I had problems with my hamstring when I joined [City] because I had snapped my hamstring earlier in the season at Leeds,” Phillips says. “Then I dislocated my shoulder [in August], then had a little strain in my calf and then did my shoulder again [in September].
“It was one thing after another. I didn’t know what was going on because I was eating well, training well, and doing everything right.”
In December, Guardiola left Phillips out of the Carabao Cup win over Liverpool because he was “overweight” after a post-World Cup holiday in New York with his long-term girlfriend, Ashleigh Behan.
“When I came into training, I had flown overnight from New York, so I’d had breakfast, lunch and dinner in America and then flew over,” Phillips says.
“I weighed myself that morning and was quite a bit over my weight target so I went up to Pep’s room and he wasn’t too happy about it, which I fully understand.”
It was another bump in the road for Phillips, but he shed the weight quickly after a brutal cardio session in City’s “environmental chamber” where the players work out on exercise bikes in temperatures of up to 40C. “It is like doing a bike ride in a sauna,” Phillips says.
He had already spent countless hours in the same chamber in the autumn as he tried to recover from shoulder surgery in time for the World Cup.
“The sports scientists said it would keep my heart rate and endurance up before I could go back out on the grass and I was happy to do it,” he says “I said: ‘Listen, I will do anything to get fit again.’ ”
The episode serves as a reminder of Phillips’s determination to succeed at City. He wants to stay at the club and fight for his place despite playing only 593 minutes last season. “There is no reason for me to leave,” he says.
To prove a point to Guardiola and his staff, Phillips reported to City’s training ground last Wednesday, five days ahead of schedule.
“I knew that my first year at City would be very difficult,” he says. “I knew I wouldn’t just walk into the team and play all the games.”
Crucially for him, it appears that he is starting to appreciate the tactical aspects of Guardiola’s game plan.
“It took quite a while for me to understand the way that Pep wanted to play,” Phillips says. “I didn’t look the same way at the game as Pep and the other players did.
“But when I was at England recently I was sitting next to [Arsenal goalkeeper] Aaron Ramsdale and I told him I look at the game so much different now to what I did before in terms of the way we play, the way we would overcome teams differently, the way Pep wants us to find the spare man. That’s all because of what Pep has taught me.
“Pep is the best manager I have worked with and he’s an absolute genius when it comes to stuff like that.”
•Kalvin Phillips: The Road to City launches on Amazon Prime Video on July 19_