By 2011, the Premier League was already a global phenom. The league’s total television revenue had grown from £50.7m per year in 1997 to £1.1bn a year in 2010. Football had expanded to the point that borders had become blurred by our remote controls. We saw more football, from more countries, than ever before.
And yet Sergio Aguero really did feel like something different, a bolt into the sky blue. Here was a player raised in South American football and developed in Spain who arrived in England at 23 as if he had been designed to flourish in our league.
Skill and pace were potent threats, but much of Aguero’s brilliance lay in the gruff engine that was hidden beneath his frame. He dashed, he danced, he dribbled; he fought, he forced. He also ranked sixth in the Premier League for headed goals during his time in England, despite being 5″8. Find Aguero something he couldn’t do well, and he’d prove he could do it better than you thought possible.
Let’s go back to Aguero’s debut in August 2011. He stands on the touchline, ready to be introduced as a substitute. Fourth official Neil Swarbrick checks his studs and his neck jewellery and then has a quiet word with Aguero – “Are you alright mate? You OK?” It is a lovely moment between superstar and layman and comes across like a parent sending their child into the playground on the first day of school.
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Aguero’s first goal is the perfect poacher finish, a deft, unspotted run to the back post to meet Micah Richards’ cross. He learned, over time, to evolve to cope with Pep Guardiola’s demands for him to stay close to goal, patient during the measured build-up play in a manner that did not come naturally to his South American instinct to be involved as much as possible. Guardiola’s arrival came roughly half-way through Aguero’s Manchester City career and most expected the pair’s styles to clash; where class meets class there’s usually a solution to be found.
The second goal is all power. Aguero picks up the ball roughly 35 yards from goal with only tired opponents in front of him. He could easily dribble through and past them; they know as much and so drop off. That allows Aguero to take a ludicrous backswing with his right foot, so exaggerated that his heel almost touches the back of his shorts, and arrow a shot past Swansea’s Michel Vorm.
Yet the two goals were not Aguero’s most instructive contribution. Three minutes after his first, he receives the ball in the penalty area and lifts it over the onrushing Vorm. The ball is surely, certainly, definitely going out for a goal kick. But Aguero sprints, jumps and is able to flick it back across goal a centimetre before it crosses the line, where David Silva sweeps home. Nobody else in City’s squad has the skill, pace, dexterity and hunger in combination to pull it off.
Therein lies the Aguero origin story. His family was poor, his neighbourhood often dangerous and many of his former friends now in jail (according to Aguero himself). Football wasn’t just a hobby or even an obsession, but a ticket to a new life. That reward provokes a determination and a competitiveness that cannot be manufactured and always accompanied his supreme stabbed finishing and his penalty-box ducking and diving. Like so many great Argentinean footballers before him, Aguero was half streetfighter, half street artist.
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Before Aguero’s arrival, Manchester City hadn’t finished in England’s top two since 1977. For all the rapid investment before him, for all the majesty of Silva and Yaya Toure, for all the dependability of Vincent Kompany and Pablo Zabaleta, Aguero was the difference-maker. He was also City’s most expensive player, their first superstar.
“Thirty-five million is a lot to repay,” said the commentator after his first goal, another emphatic reminder of how much football has changed since. If you can repay any record transfer fee in one goal, Aguero managed that too. He scored the most famous Premier League goal in the division’s history.
And if football changed, Aguero changed with it. It seems a back-handed compliment to a striker who has scored 83 more goals than any other player in Manchester City’s history, winning five league titles along the way, but the greatest success of his career was its longevity. He scored 25 league goals at the age of 19 and 25 league goals at the age of 30; others who peaked early – like Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Wayne Rooney – never came close to matching that spread. They should not feel ashamed; there are precious few examples of players scoring so prolifically so young and continuing on so long.
Aguero was eventually broken by the workload. He arrived in Manchester at the age of 23 having already amassed 300 competitive appearances for clubs and country. He suffered a long list of injury issues – knee, hamstring, calf, thigh, ribs, groin, ankle – and never started more than 31 league games in a Premier League season. That shouldn’t detract from his legacy; quite the opposite. His powers of recovery, mental resilience and ability to hit the ground running after injury, were astonishing.
But nothing ever ends without regret, whatever romance may demand. Football is not a pursuit of perfection. There is always one chance you should have taken, one game you should have won, one trophy you should have lifted. The Champions League became his bete noire, ever destined to leave him short: No start against Liverpool in 2018, missed penalty against Tottenham in 2019, injured for Lyon in 2020, left on the bench for the final against Chelsea in May.
The tinge of sadness surrounding Aguero’s retirement is more evident than it will be for most who achieved what he did. Ten years is a long time to stay at a financial superclub and seven weeks is a long time in football. On October 23, Aguero scored in El Clasico. A week later his career effectively ended, diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia that left him saying goodbye to the game in a stuffy press room rather than by taking laps of the pitch.
For a boy raised in Los Eucaliptos with a ball forever at his feet, he must have hated the ending as much as he loved the ride.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3F17DOX
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