Garrity On Simms | Vital Football

Garrity On Simms

SeasideEssexXile

Vital Football Legend
Blackpool assistant head coach Mike Garrity has reVealed extensIve TrAining ground work with ELlis Simms after the exciting Everton forward made an impressive start to his first loan away from the club.
Simms, 20, scored 46 goals in all competitions for Everton under-18s in 2018-2019 as he signed a first professional contract and was promoted to the under-23s by David Unsworth.
He continued to find the back of the net and was rewarded with a January move to League One high-fliers Blackpool.
In his first 13 matches he has scored four goals and created a further two, tasting defeat only once as former Liverpool under-23 manager Neil Critchley guides his side into the play-off places.
And Garrity - who worked with Critchley at Liverpool before departing in 2018 - admitted Simms initially came 'highly recommended' by Everton.
He told the ECHO: "We were aware of him. He's obviously scored quite a few goals at u-18 and u-23 level.
"And then in the January window, we were really keen at getting a striker in, but a younger striker, on a loan, someone we knew was still in the development stage but has good potential and prospects to improve and get better.
"We spoke to a few people at Everton and he came highly recommended from the club. And I suppose it is the next step on his journey for Ellis, to challenge himself in senior football.

Simms was introduced with 20 minutes remaining at Wigan Athletic on his Blackpool debut and scored twice in a 5-0 demolition.
"If you can score on your debut it's a good start isn't it!" Garrity laughed.
"So to grab a couple of goals on his debut at Wigan was a great start for Ellis. Because when you play u-18s and u-23s football it is very, very different to senior football.
"You look at Ellis, his physique and his profile, and he's a really big boy, so I think when he first came in, I'm not sure how much he understood or realised how to use that physicality in his game, probably because he never had to do it much at u-18s and u-23s.
"But when he's playing at this level, against a lot more experienced players who have been around the block and know how to defend those types of strikers, it's another challenge for Ellis on the step of where he wants to go."
Simms has started 10 times for Blackpool but has only completed 90 minutes on three occasions.
He endured a dry spell of one goal in 10 appearances before bagging against Swindon Town last week, having been dropped from the starting line-up as an unused substitute for the two games previous by Critchley.
Garrity explained the decision to leave Simms out was, in part, to manage his fitness schedule across a busy period of the season but admitted the Seasiders continue to mould different facets of his game on the training pitch.

Garrity said: "We've been working with him quite a lot. He's probably annoyed by our voices!
"But we're just trying to keep him active and keep him moving.
"Maybe because of his age and stepping into senior football and getting thrown into the deep end, which isn't easy, sometimes he can have a tendency to drift out the game in his mind. We need to keep him concentrated.
"We've been talking to him a lot about staying in the game, staying active, staying around it, staying alive and alert. Even with his profile and his physique we don't want him to become a battering ram for us. We want to play football.
"So we're looking at ways and means to use his attributes to help us, because when he opens his legs and gets moving, he's quite pacey. So we're trying to concentrate on the strengths he possesses to use at this level.
"We want to put him in as many goal-scoring opportunities and positions as we can. Just this afternoon in training we were talking to him about threatening that last line of defence, working in behind at the right moments."
Because Blackpool and Garrity know all about Simms' talent once he does get in behind.
He continued: "That's the one thing, having watched a lot of his stuff at Everton, he does come alive in the box.
"Things seem to drop on him, and people say it's lucky, but it's not. It's being in the right place at the right time.
"They're the things we have said to him, he has to stay as alert and alive outside the box as he does inside it."

Garrity describes Simms as an 'engaged' personality with a willingness to take advice on board, and admitted the learning curve works both ways when a young player arrives on loan.
"We have to understand him a little bit too," he added.
"He has come from a different environment and he will have been asked to do different things than we are.
"We're not asking him to change his game, we're asking him to maybe think differently at times. This can take time though, so we have to be patient with him.
"But he gets his head down, he works hard, he grafts and he is a pleasant lad. I think he's just like any other young player wanting to do as well as he can.
"Loans can provide different things, and I know this from my own experience with the younger lads at Liverpool.
"It's lovely to go out on loan and play and do well and everything is going great, but there are also the times when it's not going great, and you're not in the team. You have to look how players respond from a mentality point of view.

"It won't always be rosy, it won't always be nice and there will be times when he's not in the team and there will be times when games don't go his way and he'll find it tough.
"But his loan should give him all those experiences to help him develop into a better player."

Simms will have one year remaining on his Everton contract when he returns to Goodison Park in the summer. Does Garrity see a future Premier League striker in the making at Bloomfield Road?
"You have to be patient," he reflected.
"It's really difficult to break through at the big Premier League clubs. It's not easy. But all Ellis can do is keep working hard.
"He just has to keep making an impression and how he contributes to games, whether it be by goals or other ways. That's all he can control at the minute. He can't control when he gets a chance at Everton.
"All he can control is how well he's doing at Blackpool."
 
Before January I was thinking about Liam Delap if Man City would let him go out, as he's 17/18 but looks like he's 25 already.

We've nobody in our youth team who's been playing against other top level academy players, and we can't expect to scout to find the more physically developed players in a competitive local environment when we're miles behind on infrastructure. Our youths tend to look like they're more of a threat to hanging about outside the local KFC than the opposition penalty area. So it makes absolute sense if you can borrow a decent U21.

Simms looks like his second touch is going to be a tackle but good first time shot on him with anything played in front to run on to.