“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” Good news, then, for Jadon Sancho, who seems at every step of his footballing life to have skipped the age of promise and gone straight on to the role of luminous, fully realised talent.
The kind of promise Cyril Connolly’s famous dictum had in mind was fragile literary talent, specifically his own crushing failure, despite having, like, done really well at Eton, to write a literary classic … a failure Connolly later turned to success, with a very English sense of charm-laden irony, by writing about it at great length in Enemies of Promise.
Related: Jadon Sancho: ‘It hasn’t been easy. I’ve had to work for this’
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