It’s the opening day of the 2014-15 Championship season but it hasn’t gone well for Birmingham City. Lee Clark’s men are holding a post-match inquest in the away dressing room after a 2-0 defeat to Middlesbrough and assistant manager Richard Beale is adamant a major factor in their downfall was the failure to get their key attacking player in the game.



Beale points to one of the players sitting in the bowels of the Riverside Stadium, head bowed in defeat, and tells the others, “You have to give him the ball!”. That young man, who had become so integral to Birmingham despite only being 17 and having played just nine times since Clark gave him his debut the previous campaign, was Demarai Gray.



“We needed to get him on the ball because we were half the team without him in the game,” Beale tells The Athletic. “At that point, you realise how good he was going to be and how much of an influence he was for the team at that...