Pep Guardiola will be excited by his new toy but four goals against Wolves shows once again who City’s real star remains Welcome aboard: now beat this. Manchester City knew they were getting a purring, relentless, blond machine of a player who uses strength, speed and guile to breach defences in equal measure before marking the fact with a zen-like pose. They just did not realise Kevin De Bruyne would tick every single one of those boxes on the week Erling Haaland agreed to address their need up front, such as it is.The Belgium international replicated his new colleague’s trademark celebration after burying his third goal and if it was an act of kinship then it was also a reminder...
Events in Madrid were bone-chilling, but Pep Guardiola has the tools to ensure supporters’ heartbreak is briefHow do you mend a broken heart? Not literally, that is. If you’re Manchester City, your solution to a broken heart would probably be to spend £30m on hiring the 50 best heart surgeons in the world to defibrillate it for the next 10 years.But emotionally speaking, the time-honoured way of getting over a recent trauma is to surround yourself with loved ones, throw yourself into your work and rediscover the simple pleasures in life, which in City’s case usually involves dishing out merciless spankings to bottom-half Premier League sides. Here it was the unfortunate Newcastle United who would be City’s boxercise class, their...
At times the Manchester City midfielder resembles an all-surging throwback in Pep Guardiola’s finely calibrated machinePut out more flags. Book in the ticker-tape cannon. Prepare, once again, to be long-range triumphant. Make a nice cup of tea and perhaps everyone else will be along in a moment.At the final whistle here there was a heartfelt staccato cheer around those swooping cantilevered stands. Fists were clenched, seats vacated, aisles filled, the moment locked in. Continue reading...
A relentless treadmill of games and injuries has taken its toll on a player who looked to have the world at his feet six months agoA couple of weeks ago, Kevin De Bruyne and Oleksandr Zinchenko were filming a video for the Manchester City YouTube channel in which they answered questions put to them by fans. Someone called Hesham from Egypt asked who they thought would be the best player in the world in 2030. “I will be retired,” whispered De Bruyne. “No, you already gone,” retorted Zinchenko. “Finished. You are 30 already. You finished.”Not a bad gag, as footballer gags go. And yet in this slice of harmless male banter there was a vaguely poignant note, a recognition that...
For all their excellence, the legacy of the ageing world No 1 team boils down to the next two weeks, starting against PortugalThere is a moment towards the end of the recent BBC documentary Whistle to Whistle in which, after an hour of fixating on the details and minutiae of his job as Belgium coach, Roberto Martínez finally allows himself to take a broader view. “I just feel that this generation deserves silverware,” he says. “They deserve something that will be talked about for the next 50, 60, 70 years. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”In those few sentences, Martínez expresses the fundamental paradox of his job, in many ways the fundamental paradox of international football. Since taking...