The day David Silva waved goodbye to Manchester City, a little more than three years ago, there was a small keepsake left for John Stones. An unlikely duo, Gran Canaria meets Barnsley, the pair had grown surprisingly close. Silva’s departure hit Stones hard.
Stones opened his locker at the club’s training ground. ‘David left me a little book,’ he says. ‘A Spain National Team book. He wrote a little message in it because he always used to joke with me that one day maybe I’ll get a World Cup and two Euros.’
Silva is still at it, regularly sending him WhatsApp pictures of Spain celebrating those feats. Stones has come close to matching those and has snaps of his own. A Champions League trophy — the only major silverware to elude Silva in a career that was abruptly ended last week by an anterior cruciate ligament injury. His twilight was spent at Real Sociedad, twinkling in La Liga.
‘We’re in touch quite a lot,’ says Stones. ‘I texted him the other day. I’m super sad to know it’s finished like that. When I first came (in 2016), he took me under his wing a little bit. We are two different people who clicked somehow. He’s an incredible person, very understated.
‘We FaceTime a few times a month. Over the summer I saw him when I was on holiday. I’d love to see him more, I wish he had stayed longer, but I couldn’t convince him. I think David is the best player I’ve ever played with.’
Given the roll call of names Stones has lined up with, that is a meaningful claim. Silva has a statue outside the Etihad Stadium, with some labelling him the club’s greatest ever, though that conversation may change over time given recent history.
Stones could easily sit in a best-ever XI, particularly after last season’s exploits where he roved to such a degree that the lines between defender and creative midfielder blurred in a way that brings on headaches.
Somewhat unbelievably, the 29-year-old says he has not sought advice from Silva on his new role, one that will continue this year. It is a season with seven trophies on offer for City, starting with tomorrow’s Community Shield against Arsenal.
Silva will have marvelled at Stones in Istanbul. No player has completed more than his six dribbles in a Champions League final since Lionel Messi in 2015. Inter Milan could not pick him up and Stones ran the whole show, gliding through the night in a manner you might expect from a diminutive No 8.
The Messi statistic is put to him and Stones reveals he is already aware of it, but he still has no idea how to describe how it makes him feel. ‘Shocked, proud,’ he musters eventually. ‘What word could I use for that? I suppose I’m just proud to have that with Messi.
‘I think on such a big stage, I’m proud of myself for what I did in that game and how I grabbed it. We kept pushing, kept pushing and everyone showed courage to not let this be a replica of back in Porto.’
Porto was a night in which City froze, losing 1-0 in the 2021 final against Chelsea as Guardiola went without a recognised holding midfielder. Against Inter, he effectively had two in Stones and Rodri. Then, when City had the ball, Stones gallivanted effortlessly as he had for months before.
The switch to push the England international further forward — with City’s three remaining defenders playing more narrowly to thwart potential counters behind Stones — was a subtle variation on the same theme and acted as a platform for history.
‘I thought I knew football to a decent degree when I came. Pep made me feel like I knew nothing,’ Stones adds. ‘He’s opened my eyes to so much, he’s kind of reinvented my brain.
‘Being a defender for Pep is so rewarding. He expects a lot from us to start play and it’s rewarding when you have trained over and over, what he wants, and you see how it plays out. I absolutely love it, I’m learning. Every year there’s something new.
‘I always say when you’re happy, in anything, you enjoy it more. At the minute the players, me, I’m happy and that’s when you can express yourself more.
‘I had done the role a few times in certain different circumstances but without it being permanent as it is now. He saw with my attributes that he could simplify it and help me improve and get better in that system.
‘I find it hard talking about myself like that to be fair, but I think that sums it up. I don’t know what to say when people talk about Franz Beckenbauer!’
We will leave the Beckenbauer stuff, then. The transition has appeared easy for Stones but he disagrees, learning on the job with clips downloaded to an app on his phone.
‘The guys who play there have done it all their life and they have this 360 vision without even looking,’ he says. ‘David for example, he knew where everyone else was without even looking. Little things like that I had to mould and learn and watch myself back quite a bit.
‘The 360 thing was the most difficult for me. I haven’t got that. I feel I do more now but that’s from learning where to receive the ball and how to receive it in certain situations.
‘That was one of the things at the start where I was playing a little bit safer. In a situation where the ball was coming quickly or in a tight area, I wasn’t looking to turn out because nine out of 10 times I would probably lose the ball.’
There is a clip from a Guardiola press conference during his first season, after Stones had made some mistakes which led to goals, in which the Catalan forcefully tells those present the defender has ‘more balls than anyone in this room’.
That was in response to criticism of City playing out dangerously from the back, but Guardiola’s view is more commonly held now he has turned Stones into something else altogether.
Focusing only on this is to forget Stones’ defensive prowess, though. City have been at their best in recent seasons when he has partnered Ruben Dias.
Guardiola references the rise of City’s ‘proper defending’ a lot and the re-emergence of Stones, after he almost left the club in the same summer as Silva, is one of the stories of this era. He even headed the bar in the dying moments of the FA Cup final to stop Manchester United finding a late equaliser — the sort of act not necessarily credited to him.
‘The lads asked me if I hit the crossbar and I said I didn’t think so, I didn’t have any lumps or anything,’ he says. ‘I didn’t feel it after, but I suppose there’s not much in there. I suppose I did put my body on the line.
‘The defensive record we have now got, it does take time to get to that stage. I suppose there is a bit of nastiness in there, which I say in the best way possible. The past three years we have come on leaps and bounds in that aspect of our game. It’s clicked.’
That aspect became more pronounced with the arrival of Erling Haaland, who is partial to singing Stones’ terrace chant on the pitch. Suddenly there was a No 9 who embraced confrontation and it spread.
Bernardo Silva spent the opening moments of City’s Champions League second leg against Real Madrid winding up the visitors and it rattled them. City won 4-0. Silva scored twice.
‘The amount of clips I’ve seen of Erling, after someone scored or something, just being Erling… there’s one where he’s getting the crowd going after he had a little duel with someone. Little moments like that are brilliant for us as players, it lifts us and shows us he is there and wanting to fight for everything.
‘I think he thrives off that and the pressure, the challenge. I think probably showing people why he’s here in some aspects… maybe at the start it was, “Is he going to score?” And we know what happened after that.’
Fifty-two goals later. Haaland’s mentality saw him fit in seamlessly. Stones does his best to describe how and why City became only the second English team ever to win the Treble, when at one stage in February even lifting one pot looked doubtful.
‘Do you know what?’ he starts. ‘There’s something in the air here. I can’t put my finger on it. There are certain times, or a period, that is even more special. Everyone is just… I don’t know, something inside them that’s a winner, something comes out.
‘Everyone’s got it but I can’t say what it is, but it all comes together and we just seem to go on runs. There’s something…
‘I don’t know if we were born with it or it’s a mentality thing, but it just seems to come out and we push on. We’ve won endless trophies from critical situations.’