Alan Hutton and John Terry helped Aston Villa earn promotion to the Premier League last season.
Alan Hutton has claimed that he would have been a ‘better player’ if he had played alongside John Terry when he was younger as he praised the influence the Chelsea legend has had on Aston Villa.
During the summer of 2017, Villa secured the services of Terry on a free transfer following his departure from Chelsea, as he guided the club to the Championship play-off final under the stewardship of then-manager Steve Bruce.
Following defeat to Fulham at Wembley, Terry left that summer, but many months later, he would return in a coaching capacity where he worked alongside Dean Smith and helped the club rewrite the wrongs of the previous campaign and this time go one better and take the former European champions back to the promised land.
Prior to his release in the summer, Hutton was part of that promotion-winning squad, as Villa fans will absolutely love what the ‘Scottish Cafu’ had to say about Terry.
“The guy was brilliant for me personally as well as the boys around about him,” Hutton told Soccer AM. “What he used to do was on the pitch he would help you no matter what.
“One season I played at left-back, and to be honest, I don’t think I would have been able to do that without him next to me. He was literally at the start he was like, ‘hold, hold on and then go and confront the guy’. He would literally tell you where to be and when to go. Without him, I don’t think I’d have made it through that season playing at left-back.
“But what he started to do was when he moved into the coaching side of it, he used to take the back four in, get the clips out, some would be four good ones and four bad ones. He’d go through it and dissect it. He knew when to speak to you and when to let you handle it. He was actually quite good that way. I really wish I played alongside someone like that when I was a young player because I am sure he would have made me a better player defensively.”
Terry’s influence as a coach at Villa is already showing its worth and Tyrone Mings’ recent call-up to the England squad is proof of that.
When Mings initially joined Villa in January, they were struggling in the bottom half of the Championship, but he transformed Villa’s defence in a very short space of time.
Mings has taken that form into the Premier League as Gareth Southgate is seemingly impressed with what he has seen and he is now hoping to make his mark on the international stage.
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