I prefer to celebrate Kevin de Bruyne than to cry. In a sport that often feels so complicated and torn, has always represented the timeless beauty of football.
There are many players that I loved in the last 10 years in the Premier League, but no one but him.
I have always loved your vision above all. The passes that could be curved around a surprised and helpless defense on the path of a Sergio Agüero or Gabriel Jesús or Erling Haaland, or any other Manchester City striker with the fate of having him carrying his bullets, were art pieces.
The passes that crossed the hearts of the defenses, when I had seen a race that nobody else could have seen and touched a ball that no one else could have played, were also impressive theater moments.
Then there were their goals. Its objectives were absurd. He is there with Steven Gerrard as the sweetest striker of the ball I have seen in the English game. Many of their units, of any of the feet, still rose when they crashed in the network.
He has made the helpless spectators of the best goalkeepers of his generation. I gave myself to another look at one of its most prominent reels on Monday. There is the one who is outside his left foot and drills a classic impulse beyond the Kasper Schmeichel by Leicester City.
Kevin de Bruyne looked like a shadow of his former self, since Manchester City was hit by Liverpool on Sunday
It was the driving force in perhaps the best side of the history of the Premier League.
Bruyne has led City to great heights with its penetrating careers and incisive passes that divide the defense
There is the laser -guided missile that launches from 30 yards that flies beyond Lukasz Fabianski by Swansea City. “That is a world -class world class strike,” says Gary Neville in Sky Sports's comment. That highlights the reel continues and continues.
When the debate has emerged, I had always presented Colin Bell as the best player in the city, partly because it is preserved in my memory as part of the emotion of the first exposure to see live football when I was a child. I do not agree with those who choose Sergio Agüero on him, for example.
But now I do not doubt that De Bruyne is the best to pull the sky blue shirt. David Silva was also a genius, but from Bruyne he 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 of the city team that became the first side In the history of first -level English football to win the title of the League four years in a row and it was beautiful to see on the road.
It is a digression, but the argument about who is the best of Liverpool is more difficult to call. Mo Salah is receiving many votes in that direction at this time and is an incredible player and is a scandal that has never won the Golden Ball, but he would still have Kenny Dalglysh, Graeme Souness and Gerrard ahead of him.
If Salah stays and wins more champions, maybe that changes. Salah still seems that he has much to give and much more to achieve. I don't think that applies to De Bruyne. Many noticed, with a slight jolt, earlier this season, that Pep Guardiola had openly started talking about the best moment of Bruyne in the past time and was absolutely right.
Perhaps it is the accumulation of injuries he has suffered, perhaps it is the accumulation of all the medals he has gained and the understanding that he has no land to conquer, perhaps it is only that he is 33 years old and told, but from Bruyne Decline This has been surprisingly fast. He stayed out of the initial alignment for the second leg of his draw in the Champions League with Real Madrid last week and even when City was being humiliated, Guardiola did not turn to him. On Sunday, he began his first league game for a month.
It was not fine. It seemed that I was playing at a different pace for everyone else, no doubt all in the Liverpool team, and not in good sense. It looked like a player out of time. “I love to see the brutality of high -level sport,” Roy Keane said after the game. Sport does not expect anyone, not even someone as good as Bruyne.
The most obvious symbol of his decline came just at halftime when he took a couple of tentative steps forward on the edge of the Liverpool box and backed that shotgun of a left foot.
The city administrator, Pep Guardiola, began to speak openly about the best moment of De Bruyne last time
My seat in the press box was in a direct line with the ball trajectory. This time, instead of bursting the network, he cut wildly, on top and width to the corner flag, where Liverpool fans welcomed her with joy.
From Bruyne he walked away sadly and put his finger on his cheek, as if he was baffled by what he had just done, as if he could not understand that his body would no longer obey his mind.
I would almost have not seen him, but then I was there for many of the beautiful things he did too, and he would not have missed them for the world.
The new English football villain?
Sir Jim Ratcliffe is quickly becoming a good English football villain.
This is a 'entrepreneur' who delivers £ 200 million for Manchester United manager of Manchester, already discredited, Erik Ten in the summer, so he can buy another rag gang and then say goodbye to some of the small people of Old Trafford And let it know, this week, which is closing the canteen of the staff.
One of his many executive lackeys might want to call courage to point out that United is not losing money because Dylan Marketing has a small lasagna portion for lunch on Wednesdays.
They are losing money due to the incompetence that seems to run through the organization, whose last demonstration was the huge reward of £ 4 million to Dan Ashworth after he was fired five months in his work as sports director. You can get a lot of paninis for £ 4 million. Perhaps the caper canteen is another of the brilliant ideas of Sir Dave Brailsford of a marginal benefit.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe is quickly becoming a good English football villain.
Hammerschlagen's episode
I didn't know there was anything left, but on Saturday I discovered another sport in which I am bad. I was at a beautiful wedding in the cotswolds at the last minute of the night when I saw a group of foot guests around a wooden trunk, taking shifts to marty the nails.
Hammerschlagen is a German game where the goal is to drive the nail with the surface of the wood. Someone saw me come to a mile and prevail to play.
Since I was (relatively) sober and several of my younger opponents carried the general behavior of Juerguistas who could be seeing double, I had confidence in silence.
Five or six rebel swings of my hammer later, my nail was the last one that still stood out and I went to the bar to complete my loss of buying a round of a dozen photos of Baby Guinness. I am not sure what a Guinness baby is, by the way, but it is not Guinness.