James Milner has revealed the hardest thing he had to deal with during his career while at Newcastle United almost 20 years ago.
It’s fair to say that Milner is one of the most experienced professionals in Premier League history, but it’s a career that hasn’t been without its ups and downs.
Milner was on The High Performance Podcast where he spoke about the most difficult point of his career which came at Newcastle.
Milner was brought to tears while at Newcastle
Over the course of four years on Tyneside, Milner had made 94 Premier League appearances for Newcastle and 136 in total across all competitions.
The former Manchester City and Liverpool man is the utmost professional and has proven time and time again that his long-standing success in the game is all down to his work ethic and his high standards of himself.
But one thing that really troubled him is when something was out of his control, when he wasn’t getting picked by his manager despite doing everything, or at least what felt like everything, he could do to impress.
This is exactly what happened to the three-time Premier League winning player in his time in the North Eats, and the frustration of it all eventually pushed him to tears.
On the podcast, Milner said: “The most frustrating period of me career for me was when I felt like I was playing really well in training, really well in a game and I wasn’t getting picked. That was the hardest thing. I remember going home and getting upset, I went home and cried to the mrs. I feel like I was doing everything.
“I go and knock on the manager’s door, what can I do to get your team and what reason and I not playing and [he would say] keep doing what you’re doing. I’d rather him say you are awful and this, this and this, go and improve that but that was never what I got.
“It was when I was at Newcastle and I felt like I was doing well when I was training and playing and that was probably in that period where I was in between and you feel like you are doing everything you can but you have to go again and keep that belief.”
You need a Milner in your team to be successful
All the best teams in history have a James Milner – someone who maybe isn’t the most technically gifted or has the most goals and assists in the team, but someone who is the engine of the squad and is willing to put in the miles that everyone else isn’t.
In Newcastle’s current squad you could possibly attribute that to someone like a Sean Longstaff who will never grab the headlines for his outlandish passes or efforts on goal, but we’ve seen the team struggle to function without his high work rate.
But in fact, Eddie Howe has done such a good job at trying to make the whole squad full of Milner-like characters and so far in his reign it seems to have worked wonders.
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