De Bruyne form shows sky is the limit for City
Print Edition
MANCHESTER City’s season began to unravel when Kevin de Bruyne missed 10 matches with a knee injury but as he showed when he scored against Paris Saint-Germain on Tuesday, anything is possible with him back in the team.
The 24-year-old Belgium forward scored with a brilliantly-manufactured 76th-minute curling shot from the edge of the box to give City a 1-0 win over the French champion to reach the UEFA Champions League semifinals for the first time.
The goal secured a 3-2 aggregate success, sent the Etihad Stadium crazy with delight and earned him the headlines yesterday morning with the Manchester Evening News anointing him “King Kev”, while the Daily Mail hailed him as “Special K”.
There has only been one “King Kev” in English soccer — former European Footballer of the Year Kevin Keegan back in the 1970s and 1980s — but if De Bruyne achieves anything like the success Keegan enjoyed, he will deserve that title.
The Belgian turned down PSG to join City for a club-record fee of 55 million pounds (US$78.29 million) from VfL Wolfsburg last August, and is one of the gifts waiting to be unwrapped when Pep Guardiola takes over as City coach from Manuel Pellegrini next season.
Guardiola, whose Bayern Munich side could yet face City in this season’s competition, is expected to re-shape and overhaul the squad when he arrives, but the ever-improving De Bruyne will doubtless be central to the new coach’s plans.
After making that transfer fee look like something of a bargain with his third goal in four matches — including one in the first leg against PSG last week — since returning to the side earlier this month after two months out, de Bruyne sent out a defiant message. “We are not done yet. It is two games to the final, so we will be doing everything we can to get through,” he said. “This has been a season of ups and downs but in the Champions League we have gone from down to up. The performances have been good and hopefully we can go all the way.”
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