I would rather celebrate Kevin De Bruyne than to mourn him. In a sport that is often torn so complicated and torn, he has always represented the timeless beauty of football.
There are many players that I have viewed in the Premier League for the past 10 years, but no one more than him.
I have always loved his vision. The steps that he could curl around a shocked, helpless defense in the path of an attacking Sergio Aguero or Gabriel Jesus or Erling Haaland, or another striker of Manchester City, was lucky that he loaded their bullets were works of art.
The passes he screwed through the heart of the defense, when he had seen a point that nobody else could have seen a ball and played that no one else could have played were also breathtaking moments of theater.
Then there were his goals. His goals were absurd. He is there with Steven Gerrard as the sweetest striker of the ball I have seen in the English game. So many of his discs, from both feet, still came up when they hit the net.
He has made helpless bystanders of the best keepers of his generation. I pulled myself on a different view of one of his highlights on Monday. There is the one where he cuts outside on his left foot and drill a classic drive high along the Kasper Schmeichel of Leicester City.
There is the laser -led rocket that he launches from 30 meters that flies past Lukasz Fabianski from Swansea City. “That is an attack by a world -class player of a world -class player,” says Gary Neville on the Sky Sports Commentary. That emphasizes Reel only goes on and on.
When the debate arose, I had always brought Colin Bell to the fore as the biggest player ever in the city, partly because he has been kept in my memory as part of the excitement of the first exposure to football live as a child live. For example, I do not agree with those who choose Sergio Aguero above him.
But I don't hesitate to say that De Bruyne is the biggest ever to pull the sky -blue shirt. David Silva was also a genius, but De Bruyne was a leader in the team who won the Champions League for the first time in the history of the City in 2023. He was the best player in the city team to win the first side in the history of Top Flight Engels football to win the competition title for four years in a row and he was nice to view on the way.
It is an elaboration, but the argument about who is the largest ever of Liverpool is harder to call. Mo Salah is currently receiving a lot of voices in that direction and he is an incredible player and it is a scandal that he never won the balloon d'or, but I would still have Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Gerrard for him.
If Salah stays and wins more champions competitions, that might change. Salah still seems as if he still has a lot to give and to achieve much more. I don't think that applies to De Bruyne. Many noticed, with a light shock earlier this season, that Pep Guardiola began to talk openly about De Bruyne's Prime in the past tense and he was absolutely right.
Perhaps it is the accumulation of injuries he has sustained, perhaps it is the accumulation of all the medals he has won and the realization that he has no countries to conquer, maybe it is just that he is and counts, but De Bruyne This refuses the season has been surprisingly fast. He was left out of the starting line-up for the second stage of their Champions League-equal game with Real Madrid last week and even when City was humiliated, Guardiola did not turn to him. On Sunday he started his first league match for a month.
It didn't go well. He looked like he was playing at a different pace for everyone, especially everyone in the Liverpool team, and not in a good way. He looked like a player of the time. “I like to look at the brutality of sport at top level,” said Roy Keane after the game. Sport is waiting for nobody, not even someone who is as good as De Bruyne.
The most obvious symbol of his deterioration came exactly on the edge of the break when he put a few preliminary steps forward on the edge of the Liverpool box and that the shotgun of a left foot waved back.
My chair in the press box was in a direct line with the trajectory of the ball. This time it cut instead of bursting the net, wild away, high and wide to the corner flag, where the fans of Liverpool welcomed it with Glee.
De Bruyne unfortunately turned and put his finger on his cheek, as if he was surprised about what he had just done, as if he could not fully understand that his body would no longer obey his mind.
I almost wanted me not to see it, but then I was there for so many of the beautiful things he did, and I would not have missed them for the world.
The new villain of English football?
Sir Jim Ratcliffe quickly turns into a rip-smoking good old-fashioned villain of English football.
This is a 'businessman' who switched £ 200 million to washed up, already discredited in Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag in the summer, so that he can buy a different gang Duds and then some of the little people in Old Trafford can Display and it is known this week that he closes the staff canteen.
One of his many manager Lakeys may want to call on the courage to point out that United is not losing money because Dylan van Marketing has a small part of Lasagne for his lunch on Wednesday.
They lose money because of the incompetence that seems to run straight through the organization, the newest manifestation of which was the enormous payment of £ 4 million than Ashworth after he was fired in his work as sports director for five months. You can get a lot of paninis for £ 4 million. Perhaps the canteen hairdresser is another of the brilliant ideas of Sir Dave Brailsford about a marginal win.
The episode of Hamerschlagen
I didn't know there was anything left, but on Saturday I discovered another sport that I am bad at. I was at a beautiful wedding in the Cotswolds late in the evening when I saw a group of guests standing around a wooden tree trunk and in turn to hammer nails.
Hammerschlagen is a German game where the goal is to ride the nail equally with the surface of the wood. Someone saw me a mile away and I had the upper hand to play.
Since I was (relatively) sober and several of my younger opponents wore the general comportment of partygoers who perhaps saw double, I was quietly confident.
Five or six idiosyncratic swings from my hammer later, my nail was the last to still get out and I was on my way to the bar to complete my forfeiture of buying a round of a dozen nauseous -looking photos of baby Guinness. By the way, I am not entirely sure what a baby Guinness is, but it is not a Guinness.
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