Meet the Gallaghers: ‘Even now we still have a play fight and beat Conor up’
https://theathletic.com/2224929/2020/11/29/meet-the-gallaghers-west-brom/
“To us he’s our little brother,” laughs Josh Gallagher. “Mum still runs his bath when he’s home.”
Conor Gallagher might be making a big impression on the Premier League with West Bromwich Albion and have scored his first Premier League goal to clinch a first victory of the season for Slaven Bilic’s side on Saturday, but in one corner of Surrey he will always be the baby of an impressive football family.
The Chelsea loanee, who scored in Saturday’s 1-0 Hawthorns win against Sheffield United, has honed his craft at the club’s Cobham academy alongside friends including Reece James, Mason Mount, Tammy Abraham and West Ham’s Declan Rice.
But his competitive instincts came, perhaps, from the back yard of the family home in Great Bookham, where he played alongside three older footballing brothers who have all enjoyed success in the game.
“One thing our dad always drilled into us was that we had to stand up for ourselves, especially on a football pitch,” says Josh, aged 27, who now earns his living in a school and runs his own coaching business in the evening.
“We always had to be physical and stand up for ourselves. We always had to compete no matter how big we were and that’s how it always was.
“Conor’s not the biggest but he’s very lean and I think he gets his competitiveness from us boys. Even now we still have a play fight and beat him up a bit, and we still kick him around in the garden.
“He’s always been competitive and he’s always been a bit fearless. If you put him on a trampoline when he was younger he was doing backflips and he could have quite easily taken up gymnastics. He just had that fearlessness so he didn’t mind doing backflips off this and that and I think he’s taken that into his football…”
Conor Gallagher, the youngest of Lee and Samantha Gallagher’s four sons, was just seven years old and playing alongside Reece James for Epsom Eagles when he was first spotted by scouts from Chelsea.
By then, his siblings had already made names of their own.
Josh and twin brother Jake, seven years Conor’s senior, had both earned places at Fulham’s youth academy, while Dan, now aged 23, was playing in the youth ranks of AFC Wimbledon.
For Conor, though, came the star prize.
The boys had grown up as Chelsea fans, based a 10-minute drive from the club’s Cobham training ground, and it was the youngest who got the chance to play for the club.
“Mum and Dad never forced us to do anything,” says Josh. “We did a lot of things when we were young — rugby, football, tennis, karate, all sorts of clubs, but football was the one they saw us play and thought we were good.
“Whether it was me, Jake, Dan or Conor, they saw we had a real passion for football and that’s what got us going.
“From then on it was just play and see where we got to and that’s what got me and Jake picked up by Fulham, Dan by AFC Wimbledon and Conor by Chelsea.
“As we’ve got older, we’ve got more of an understanding of how it all worked, which I think helped Dan and Conor to push it a bit further than we did. Don’t get me wrong, Conor is a fantastic player but I think him and Dan had that little edge.
“It was all new to me, Jake and my dad, whereas we had seen those ups and downs so I think Dan and Conor had a better way of dealing with things.”
Josh’s time at Fulham was short-lived and he dropped into grassroots football, now playing for Abbey Rangers in the Combined Counties League — the ninth tier of English football.
Jake, the eldest of the brothers by seven minutes, stayed with Fulham until the age of 16, signed a scholarship and then a professional contract at Millwall and played for Welling before four years with Aldershot.
Dan, meanwhile, was handed a scholarship with Wimbledon on their rise to the EFL before dropping into non-League football first on loan to Kingstonian, and then on a permanent basis with Leatherhead.
Jake and Dan now play together for Leatherhead’s rivals, Dorking Wanderers, where Jake and Josh coach the under-18s.
Football is in the blood, although had things turned out differently it might well have been petrol.
“Dad and his family all played but they never took their football seriously,” says Josh. “They played Sunday morning, grassroots football.
“They never took the step to going into semi-pro and getting paid, they were into their banger racing when they were younger!”
As his older brothers grew up and made their way towards professional clubs, the youngest member of the Gallagher clan was getting a rapid footballing schooling at home in the family’s medium-sized garden.
“We used to have seven-a-side goals, then we went up to nine-a-side, and when Conor got his contract at Chelsea, he forked out for a full-on 11-a-side metal goal,” says Josh. “Before we were putting up with plastic ones that used to break easily.
“We occasionally played two-on-two but mainly one of us used to go in goal and the other three would play at having shots from outside the box and flicking up volleys.
“It sounds a bit sad but we used to have great fun doing it.
“You could see Conor was talented but he was no different to how we were when we were younger with that hunger, desire and will to win. We all had that, but as we got older there was always a sense that Conor might make it.”
Eventually, though, Conor’s football started to become serious. After a couple of years attending Chelsea’s “pre-academy” sessions and playing for Epsom Eagles alongside James and Alfie Doughty, now with Charlton, he was offered a place in the academy at the age of nine.
With Rice and Mount a year older, James alongside him and Abraham a couple of years further on but still on the scene, Chelsea had a prodigious crop of talent that also included Fikayo Tomori, a couple of years older than Conor, and Rhian Brewster, who left for Liverpool at 14.
Conor held his own and eventually thrived, but the path was not always straightforward.
Between the ages of nine and 12 the group was put through intensive technical training sessions and Gallagher made big improvements. Sources from the academy have told The Athletic his ability to manipulate the ball equally well with both feet particularly caught the eye.
“He was brilliant up until 15 or 16 when you get your growing pains,” says Josh. “His knees were playing up so we were a little bit concerned.
“We didn’t actually know if he would make that next step because he was struggling, they were managing his minutes so he wasn’t playing as much as he would have liked and it reached a point where we thought, ‘God, is he even going to be offered a scholarship?’
“He got offered a scholarship because they wanted to give him a chance but it wasn’t until he started playing under-18s on his scholarship and was going in every day that we realised, ‘My god, he’s really kicked on’.
“That’s when we thought, ‘I think we’ve got a player here’.
“We just saw him playing out there and it was more progressed, more tactical and you could see he was really getting it and matching up physically.
“He was stronger and fitter. He kicked on from being in and out of the youth team to becoming captain in the second year, he played in the FA Youth Cup, then England Under-17s and won the World Cup, then he kicked on with England and he’s now in the under-21s.”
“Then he played in the UEFA Youth League when he was at Chelsea and they lost in the final to Barcelona.
“Then he had a good season with the under-23s, then kicked on to playing Championship football last season and took the next step into the Premier League.
“With every step he seems to smash it. You just wait for it to settle down and think, ‘OK, he’s found his level and it will take a couple of years to settle down’ but every time so far he’s seemed to smash it. It’s crazy.”
Speaking in Saturday’s matchday programme, Conor said: “Every young player gets moved around to a lot of positions. I’ve played right wing, right-back, midfield, and I remember playing in goal once.
“It was just one game because our goalkeeper was injured or didn’t turn up.”
Gallagher’s knees were not the only health problem that threatened to halt his progress. In 2018, after experiencing heart problems, he underwent a 45-minute operation to correct an irregular heartbeat.
It was a success, but he had been warned there was a slim prospect that the problem could not be solved.
“I just thought, ‘That can’t happen’,” he told The Guardian in January. “I was a bit nervous but in my head I knew I would be fine and push on from that. I think it was good for me, because sometimes when you’re injured it gives you time to reflect and makes you even hungrier to come back and do well.
“I remember saying to my mum before the surgery, ‘I just want to get it done so I can work as hard as I can again’ and that’s what I did. Ever since then I think that’s when I really started to push on. I think it made me not take anything for granted. I got physically stronger and quicker and my all-round game has improved since I came back from that.”
Last season was spent in the Championship, beginning with Charlton and ending with Swansea.
His performances caught the eye of Slaven Bilic’s advisors and, having decided against pursuing a loan in January, Albion made their move this summer.
While negotiations continued with several clubs, Gallagher enjoyed what for many was a routine friendly, but a significant day for him. When he figured for Chelsea as a 54th-minute substitute in a 1-1 draw with Brighton at the Amex Stadium in a game best known as a pilot event for the return of fans after the COVID-19 shutdown, it was his first and, to date, only appearance for Chelsea’s senior side, slotting into midfield alongside N’Golo Kante and Mateo Kovacic.
He said: “When you’re younger you train with them here and there but the last two years I’ve done pre-season with the first team which has been nice since Frank Lampard took over. He was someone I used to base my game around.
“As I got older, I felt a box-to-box midfielder was the best position for me. It’s great to train with a team and players as good as they have.”
Chelsea tied him down to a new, five-year contract, then it was again time to leave Stamford Bridge to further his education, this time in the Premier League.
Gallagher initially opted to remain on loan in London and had a medical at Crystal Palace, but a change of heart by the south London club saw Michy Batshuayi become their one permitted loanee from Stamford Bridge, giving Bilic the chance to contact former West Ham team-mate Frank Lampard and help smooth the way for a move to The Hawthorns.
Gallagher has made six Albion appearances so far and, with his blend of energy, commitment and guile in possession, has rarely failed to catch the eye.
Saturday’s game against Sheffield United was, perhaps, his least impressive all-round performance but it brought the all-important goal as his cushioned shot from outside the penalty area found the bottom corner.
At the age of just 20, he has become a key figure for Bilic’s side and drawn inevitable comparisons with Chelsea manager Lampard, his boyhood idol.
“It isn’t going to help the boy to have so much praise and I’m not a big fan of that but you can’t help but notice it,” said Bilic of the Lampard parallels. “He ticks those boxes. He plays in the same position, he has everything, and it’s not a little bit of everything, it’s a lot of everything.
“The only thing that concerns me, but only in theory, is whether he’s going to be able to maintain this level of concentration and commitment when the praise starts to come to him, but he looks like he is.
“He’s going to need the help of his family and his coaches and his managers, team-mates and entourage but the boy has everything on a big scale. He’s going to be big.
“I expected him to be full of energy, enthusiasm and motivation for the Premier League. I knew it would be like that but for a 20-year-old guy to be that reliable and have the game management to make proper decisions and to basically be so consistent is not normal.”
For the young Gallagher, the presence of Lampard in the Chelsea manager’s office has brought him together with a boyhood hero.
Meanwhile, he finds himself getting advice from several other greats of Chelsea past and, thanks to another piece of Albion’s summer transfer business, playing alongside another.
“Branislav Ivanovic went up to him the other day, they were playing in a game together, and he said, ‘Come on Chelsea’, which is quite funny for us,” jokes Josh. “Frank Lampard and John Terry were our absolute heroes growing up, but we were all midfielders so that’s why Lampard always had the edge over JT.
“I wouldn’t know what to do in Conor’s position. I’d be following Lampard around, but Conor takes it in his stride.
“Don’t get me wrong, he appreciates it all but he doesn’t let it get to him too much. He’s very relaxed about it all.
“He’s got people like (Chelsea staff members) Claude Makelele, Paulo Ferreira, Tore Andre Flo, Carlo Cudicini — all people we watched growing up and they’re the ones who are phoning Conor about his loan move.
“People would pay fortunes for these phone calls but Conor is so relaxed about it.”
Composure is a trait that coaches have always seen in the youngest Gallagher.
He was identified by Chelsea coach Jody Morris as the right man to captain the club’s under-18s and Bilic has already been struck by his ability to take challenges in his stride.
“Some people think nerves are a good thing but I like to play with no pressure,” Conor said. “Playing the full 90 minutes in recent weeks was great for me and fortunately I’ve done quite well but now is the time to push on and improve even more because it’s still just the start for me.”
Just the start, perhaps, but impressive nevertheless, and his solid displays for England’s under-21s at the most recent training camp has already got him dreaming of following old friends James, Rice, Mount and Abraham into the senior set-up.
Gareth Southgate has, after all, not been shy of promoting youngsters.
Gallagher added: “I always consider it an honour to play for my country and to feature in both games during the international break was great.
“At England the manager (Aidy Boothroyd) said in the last four years there were 21 players from the U21s that went up to the senior side.
“To see the likes of Jude Bellingham and players I know personally like Mason Mount is great to see and it gives young English players hope and it gives me hope that if I keep performing, then I might get a chance.”
While Conor is now playing and working alongside some of his heroes and aspiring to greater feats, he seems unlikely to ever again share a pitch with his brothers.
The siblings, all former students at Howard of Effingham School, have come up against each other before, Josh losing with Corinthian-Casuals against Dan’s AFC Wimbledon in an FA Cup game. Dan’s Leatherhead have also faced Jake’s Aldershot, while Conor’s Chelsea under-23s have previously played against Jake’s Aldershot.
But for now, Conor’s career has taken a different trajectory, so his brothers will take a back seat, play their own football and support their little brother via WhatsApp messages, chats and hopefully, if COVID-19 rates allow, visits to The Hawthorns before his season-long loan is completed.
“We are very close,” says Josh. “We’ve got a couple of cousins as well, who all join in, and we’re just one big family and we do everything together.
“There are no arguments or fights, it’s just banter and support for each other. We’ve always been close and there have never been any problems with jealousy. It’s always been constant love and respect and supporting each other and willing each other on in whatever we do.
“We are all central midfielders. We’ve always dreamed of having a little midfield diamond.
“Dan would be the holding midfielder. He sweeps up everything and he’s brilliant at it.
“Jake and myself would be the legs in midfield and Conor would be at the top.”
