Former Everton captain has defended his decision to play his son and Romeo Beckham in Inter Miami’s 6-0 thrashing against Barcelona despite neither of the pair having previously featured in a single minute of Major League Soccer action for the club. Neville, who made 303 appearances for Everton between 2005-13, scoring five goals, has been head coach of the Florida outfit, part-owned by his former Manchester United team-mate Beckham, since January last year but the Mirror reports that he received a backlash for calling the friendly the “biggest match” in his club’s history and was jeered for fielding the English rookies.
Harvey Neville, 20, and Romeo Beckham, 19, are both regulars for Inter Miami’s second team who play in the MLS Next Pro, the third tier in the US and Neville senior insisted his decision to give them their debuts in the mauling at the hands of the Catalan giants was vindicated, despite what many of the home fans thought. Neville junior played the full second half at right-back after replacing 74-cap USA international DeAndre Yedlin, who had spells in England with Tottenham Hotspur, Sunderland and Newcastle United while Beckham came on for Bryce Duke on 86 minutes and the hosts already 6-0 down.
Neville told reporters: “I was super proud of them both. Romeo only got on for the last five or six minutes, which is difficult, but they’d earned the right to get on.
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“They both showed really good temperament and I think tonight we learned an awful lot. It was a big challenge for us, as you could see. We were playing against world-class players, two world-class teams in each half really.
“So it was a brilliant occasion to play in, you could feel the buzz in the air, the supporters – we’ve now experienced what a sold out Drive Pink (DRV PNK Stadium) feels like. I think from a playing point of view, the game was always going to be something for us to really enjoy.
“And we’ve got a lot of young players in there that will have taken some real valuable experiences about the level that you need to be at to play at the top, top level. DeAndre [Yedlin] has played at the top, top level, we’ve got players that want to go to World Cups, play in the Champions League etcetera and they’ve experienced tonight what the best do.
“I thought it was a brilliant learning experience for us all. It was difficult, we had to dig in, we had to fight, we had to accept that they were going to have a lot of possession of the ball and really to keep it to 6-0 was a real positive for us.
“It’s a great learning experience for everyone in the team and everyone got onto the pitch that we wanted to, got valuable experience, and they will have learnt an awful lot.”
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