West Brom flyer Tom Fellows cannot hide pride at a maiden England call
Albion starlet Tom Fellows admits an international call was beyond his wildest dreams this season as the winger enjoyed another milestone in a breakthrough campaign.
Youth graduate Fellows, 20, this time last season was helping League Two loan side Crawley face-off against Harrogate, Doncaster and Rochdale in the fight for survival.
Twelve months, on the south Birmingham youngster is a regular for Carlos Corberan, with 27 appearances, four goals and four assists to his name, a new long-term Baggies contract and now international recognition for the first time with an England under-20s call.
Fellows, who is set to figure against Bristol City at The Hawthorns today, said: “I’m honoured to be called up, it’s something I didn’t really expect. If you look at the start of the season to now, the last thing I thought I’d get was an England under-20 call-up. It’s an honour and no-one can take it away from me.
“Hopefully I’ll have grandkids and live a long life and to tell them I’ve been involved in an England set-up, it’s good.”
The youngster added: “It should be a good experience, it’s good to learn off other coaches there and a lot of good players, we’ll see what happens.”
Fellows was handed his Albion bow by Valerien Ismael in early 2022 but had to wait the best part of two years until a proper breakthrough under Corberan, which came after earning his stripes in League Two and a promising pre-season campaign last summer.
It was then the Albion head coach put his faith in both Fellows and Caleb Taylor as first-team squad members – in the latter’s case for the first half of the season.
Boss Corberan said Fellows had benefitted from following experienced colleagues Kyle Bartley, 32, Matt Phillips, 33, and Erik Pieters, 35, who despite more advancing years retain a thirst for information and improvement.
“Every time the players of our club is called by their national teams is a consequence that they are performing very well and they are making the right steps, so we always are pleased, it means they are doing their jobs well,” Corberan said of Fellows.
“When we have players like Phillips, Pieters and Bartley, that are more than 30, and they want to learn, so to have a young player that doesn’t want to work is a problem, in terms of the mentality.
“With him that is not the case because he is very humble, very calm, he knows one thing is to have talent and the other is to bring it to the pitch, another is to bring it to the pitch sometimes and another is always, another is to show your talent from the bench and another is the first eleven. Another thing is to do it in a row and another is from time to time.
“So in front of him he has a lot of challenges and he needs to keep growing to face and show he can arrive to the level he can.”
Fellows will represent head coach Ben Futcher’s elite league squad – a rebranding of the under-20s – in Poland and Czechia for clashes against those nations next Friday and on Tuesday week.
He follows Andi Weimann (Austria), Semi Ajayi (Nigeria), Mikey Johnston (Republic of Ireland) and Callum Marshall (Northern Ireland) as senior members of the Albion squad who have received calls.
