The likes of Liverpool and Man City might find the going though over the next couple of seasons with the big pharma companies focusing on Covid.
1 Like
They’ve always found it tough outside Italy.
The bribery budget can only cover domestic referees
City will walk this
Ooooft, what a stat.
Simpler times
Beautiful 
Lovely girl there with 30 seconds to go.
3 Likes
A fine lass
Real Manchester. The people’s club.
I’m good for lawyers living in Didsbury at the moment Flatty. Even ones with come to bed eyes.
Thanks for thinking about me all the same.
Aguero heading off. One of the best premier league players ever. Probably one of the best players to never win a champions league.
2 Likes
I had the joy to win tickets to City vs Kiev in the CL last 16 a few years back pre pep. A horrific game that ended nil all. I watched aguero for the match he never stopped moving and losing his marker, it was clear to see what he is top striker
One of the main reasons he never won one was because he never performed well in big CL games
Be great to send him off with the big one.
The secrets to Sergio Aguero’s record-breaking success: analysing rival strikers, Only Fools and Horses … and his small feet
Sam Lee Jan 12, 2020
78 
What separates Sergio Aguero from other goalscorers?
“I remember him going mad that he didn’t score,” Joleon Lescott, a former Manchester City team-mate, tells The Athletic , “and that was a side of it that people don’t know.”
But surely plenty of strikers are like that and it is suggested he now has a different outlook now anyway.
“He’s changed in that I think he plays more for the team,” Domenec Torrent, Pep Guardiola’s assistant for two years in Manchester, adds. “He combines better with everybody, it’s not that he’s only happy when he scores goals, he’s happy if he plays well.”
Aguero’s evolution has seen him become the top Premier League overseas goalscorer, surpassing Thierry Henry, but some things have never changed, like his technical ability, the goalscorer’s instincts, the sense of humour and an unheralded dedication to studying his rivals.
“He analyses. He knows every striker that we are ready to play,” Willy Caballero says. “He spends a lot of time studying the goalkeepers, he’s thinking all the time about the next goalkeeper that he is going to face in case he plays a one-v-one and he has to shoot according to how the goalkeeper dives.”
Maybe these are the things that set him apart. Or maybe it’s his small feet.
City already had Carlos Tevez, Edin Dzeko and Mario Balotelli, but they wanted more. Then Atletico Madrid ran into financial difficulties.
“At that time we really didn’t think he would be available to us,” Brian Marwood, City’s director of football for the first years of the Abu Dhabi era, explains.
“We’d scouted the year before, I remember going to watch Atletico Madrid against Valencia and I think he and (Fernando) Torres played up front for Atletico and David Villa played up front for Valencia, so we were in the market for strikers. I think maybe David Silva played as well that night.
“We probably didn’t think he was going to become available, so we were quite surprised when we got a sense that Atletico could be open to an offer.”
Chelsea had come close to signing him on a couple of occasions, but were put off by Atletico’s 2009 asking price of £40 million, agent demands and, possibly, John Terry’s suggestion that his movement wasn’t that impressive. City were not deterred.
“These type of strikers don’t come around that often,” Marwood adds. “It felt a heavy number at the time, but actually over the course of time it’s proved to be a fantastic investment.”
Atletico received €36 million at first and would have been rubbing their hands together at how quickly their star man settled into life at his new club — for every 15 goals he scored they received another €250,000, for every 25 appearances another €250,000, and for every league title another €1 million.
Going into stoppage time on the final day of his debut 2011-12 season, Aguero had scored 29 goals and City were second in the table. So that iconic strike against Queens Park Rangers, known forever to City fans as “93:20”, cost them another €1.25 million.
Granted, that probably wasn’t the first thing that crossed their minds as City won their first league title since 1968, with Aguero at the heart of a groundbreaking season.
If he had left the club that very summer, after just a year in Manchester, he would have forever been remembered as a City hero. Instead, he has stayed, probably longer than anybody expected, and become a legend for the club and surely now English football.
His powerful first-half strike from the edge of the penalty box against Aston Villa on Sunday moved him on to 175 Premier League goals, level with Henry, one of the most dominant forwards ever to play on these shores. Just before the hour mark, he calmly passed the ball beyond Orjan Nyland to claim the record for himself. For good measure, his third goal at Villa Park completed his 12th Premier League hat-trick, overtaking Shearer’s record.
There are only four men above Aguero in the all-time standings and, while he most likely won’t reach Alan Shearer’s tally of 260 league goals, he ought to move into second place, above Frank Lampard (also on 177), Andrew Cole (187) and even Wayne Rooney (208), by the end of his glorious decade in England, should he leave at the end of his contract in 2021.
He arrived with a big reputation, but who could have expected the extent of his success when he signed for City?
Especially given he didn’t try especially hard in training all those years ago, just like Tevez.
“Sergio had that mindset in terms of how they viewed the importance of training (compared) to games,” Lescott says. “It was different with Sergio because nobody knew him as well as Carlos, so we thought, ‘Is he going to do what we hope?’, and then all of a sudden he did it, it wasn’t even a question.
“His first game was Swansea and he scored two, but even in training I remember his first session, we did some attack versus defence and he went at Vinny (Kompany), went past Vinny and then he went past me.
“By that time Vinny had got back up and he’d gone past him again and he’s through, he’s chopped between us and he missed, he didn’t score, but I was looking at Vinny thinking, ‘Yeah, he’s the real deal’. He was definitely different to what was in the Premier League and that was part of the thought of him being a special talent.”
Lescott says Aguero “wasn’t the most professional that we had, but it was enough for what he needed to do and only he knows what he needs and when he needs it, and he mastered that.
“There was a goal against United at Old Trafford, he’d been out with a knee injury, and I remember him getting told to warm up, and I remember watching him, and he was standing there, and I’m thinking, ‘You’re not even warm. You’ve done nowhere near enough… or nowhere near enough what I’d have to do to be warm, to go onto this game,’ and he went on and within five minutes he’d scored a goal and we won 2-1.”
Even if his body wasn’t always working overtime, his brain was.
“He’s a really clever and smart guy, his mind is always working but it doesn’t show too much because he’s really calm,” Caballero says.
“We spoke a lot about the next striker that we were going to play to give me information about the player. He’s good with this because he knows very well his opponent, the striker, but he knows also the opposition goalkeeper, how they work, how they dive, he knows the angles, he knows everything about this. It was a very good impression because he spends a lot of time studying goalkeepers.”
Aguero pays particular attention to the City analysts’ pre-match reports, making sure to focus on particular the movements of the opposition defenders and goalkeepers to give him every advantage, which helps to explain why, of his 177 league goals, he has plenty against the top teams; 11 against Tottenham, 10 against Chelsea, nine against Villa, eight against Arsenal and Manchester United and seven against Liverpool.
He has had several infamous run-ins with David Luiz over the years, including two separate, ugly two-footed lunges, but they get on pretty well, considering. After the first foul, in the FA Cup in 2013, they laughed and joked on the phone and have exchanged messages since, although Luiz constantly tries to wind up opponents and his mocking of City’s “pretty passing” during a 3-1 defeat in 2016 provoked the second foul, and the only red card of Aguero’s time in England.
Usually, he is much more amiable and it is a mark of Aguero’s character that he shares the analysis of his opponents with the man who he genuinely feared was brought in to take his place.
“He talks to me a lot about the game, about openings, about defenders and keepers,” Gabriel Jesus said recently. “We have a very good relationship.”
Things looked dicey for Aguero a few years ago. It is water under the bridge now but for a while he believed he was being forced out by Guardiola.
It even took the intervention of the City chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, who had a meeting with Aguero in Los Angeles during pre-season in 2017, to assure him his place at the club was assured and that he and Guardiola would have no more problems.
The first 18 months of the Catalan’s reign did not always run smoothly, but ultimately both men only ever wanted the same thing; for Aguero to be playing and playing well.
Torrent insists the striker was always willing to learn, even if Guardiola and his staff had expected something a little more in line with Lescott’s experiences.
“The idea that we had before we arrived was completely different,” Torrent explains. “When we arrived in Manchester we found a player with a lot of desire, despite being a star player, to learn new things.
“When you see him but don’t know him, you think he is a player who only thinks about goals and nothing else, but more than that he’s very respectful of the coaches he works with, he’s very humble and always wants to learn new things. He always used to ask us after the training sessions what he had done well, if we had liked how he had trained, what he could improve.”
Clearly, given he had scored 125 City goals before Guardiola’s arrival, he was already an elite striker.
“Like a lot from that part of the world, he was strong mentally, strong physically,” Marwood says. “Even though he was fairly small, even at a very young age, he had those really thick-set thighs that gave him a real explosion.”
Torrent takes on the theme: “I think he’s a very, very explosive player, he’s very, very fast over the first five metres, it’s almost impossible to stop him. Unless you foul him, he’ll get past you. He reminds me a little, when he starts running, of Romario when he was at Barcelona.”
Lescott adds: “He had a different kind of ability and centre of gravity. I hadn’t come across something like that.
“He just knows exactly what to do and when to do it in front of goal. They don’t teach that. When he gets in front of goal he has his foot planted. He has this little stutter where you can see him relax, and it’s as if he’s saying, ‘I’ve been here before, I’ve done this’ and it goes in.
“It’s like he’s seeing it in slow motion. That was when I used to pick his brains in training. He literally wanted to hit the centre of the ball. You’ll see it a lot of times where he may fall over, but the ball will go where it’s supposed to, whereas there are other strikers that don’t fall over but the ball goes anywhere, and I’m thinking Sergio wants to hit the middle of the ball, so then he knows he’s in control of it.”
There was a single-minded determination to be the best, too. “I remember when Luis Suarez was at Liverpool and there was a chance he could finish top goalscorer,” Lescott says. “I remember Sergio saying to me, ‘they’re playing this team’ — I won’t disrespect the team (by naming them) — ‘he’ll probably score two. So I need to go and score three at the weekend.’ And that was the mindset. It wasn’t in an arrogant way, he just had to be there, and that’s the difference to be an out-and-out goalscorer, you have to have that selfishness.”
Caballero has another theory, a very South American one.
“Sometimes players with small feet have more quality to kick,” he says. “Maybe not more quality than the others but they kick differently to other players because they have less area to kick on the ball because of the small feet so, more control.”
Really?
“We have had in South America a goalkeeper and top scorer (Jose Luis) Chilavert, he was a Paraguayan who scored a lot of free-kicks and penalties and his feet were much smaller than mine and of a lot of players, and he kicked very well. From this moment the newspapers and magazines started to say it, and in fact it’s real because for a long time in my career I’ve thought this about my team-mates.”
Aguero’s boots are size 8.5, so maybe there is something in it.
What cannot be disputed is that he scores all kinds of goals, even if 156 have come from inside the box. Think about that goal Lescott described at Old Trafford, when he drifted in from the left flank, darted across the area to beat three men and fired it into the top corner from the edge of the six-yard box as he fell forward — the ball going exactly where he wanted to go, also as Lescott described.
That was one of 126 with his right foot, compared to just 33 with his left, but there have been some fine examples of those too, like the opener against Liverpool a year ago when he was lying on the ground in the six-yard box as the ball was cleared, then sprang up, disappeared into thin air for a second and re-emerged goal-side of Dejan Lovren to control it with his right and rifle it into the roof of the net with his left.
And there have been times, earlier in his City career, when he carried the team on his own, like Tevez before him. “Where would City be without Aguero?” was the question being asked in late 2014, when twice at QPR he took down balls over the top, steadied himself, held off several challenges and found the net, both times with his left foot, earning a struggling team a 2-2 draw. A few days later, he went one better against Guardiola’s Bayern.
“I remember the worst thing that happened to us with Bayern Munich, when he scored a hat-trick against us, and that was spectacular,” Torrent, part of the Bayern staff at the time, says. “When you have Aguero as a team-mate you see how good he is, when you have him as a rival you see how difficult it is to mark him, and how dangerous he is.
“We had said that he was a player who doesn’t always seem to be on the pitch. That’s very Kun, isn’t it? Sometimes you say, ‘Where is Kun?’, you don’t know where he is, he hasn’t participated if you dominate the game, and Bayern dominated the game, but inside the area he’s always well positioned, and at times it seems that he is switched off but he is actually in control.
“You have to be very alert because if you make an error he will take advantage and score, and that happened against Bayern. He scored the goals in nothing, 10 spectacular minutes.”
He’d scored the first from the penalty spot early on but after that Bayern, with 10 men, played City off the pitch, until Aguero burst through on goal twice in the last five minutes, striking with his left and right.
“When he is in front of goal he’s never nervous,” Torrent says. “It’s a very good quality because there are strikers who, when they are in front of the goalkeeper, shoot in any old way, but he doesn’t, he has that intelligence to know what the best option is. He has that unique sense of knowing where the ball has to go, getting free of his marker and then finishing.”
Those goals don’t count towards his Premier League tally, of course, but it would be silly to ignore his 34 strikes for City in Europe, especially as he became the club’s all-time leading scorer by finishing a lightning counter-attack against Napoli in 2017.
It was around that time he was finally getting to grips with what Guardiola wanted, becoming the well-rounded No 9 we see today.
“This type of player, not just Kun, when they don’t have the ball it seems that they are not interested in the game, they don’t participate, they don’t defend. I think he has improved a lot in that sense,” Torrent says.
“He’s improved a lot. He now helps the team a lot more with their pressing, when he has to defend. He’s very attentive when Pep says to him, ‘Today we are going to press like this’ or ‘You have to cover the right centre-back or left centre-back’, he’ll do it. He’s very, very, very attentive to that. This is what I mean when I say he’s improved, he is switched on when his team doesn’t have the ball.
“For example, I did everything in terms of set pieces, you know we use zonal marking, so I put him in situations where he had to think — as he wasn’t a strong header I put him in comfortable situations but when the opposition played it short he had to anticipate what was happening and in that sense he’s very fast, very intelligent, he learns very quickly.
“When you tell him, ‘Kun, put yourself between two players, if they pass the ball here you go out, but you have to do it diagonally, or you have to try to stop him using his left foot because that’s his strong side,’ he will understand very quickly. There are players who find that difficult but mentally he was very quick, very agile, very quick to understand things.”
As well as pressing he was also tasked with dropping deeper, linking up with his team-mates and making smarter, off-the-ball runs.
It has got to the stage that, ahead of Argentina’s clash with Venezuela at the Copa America last summer, Aguero explained to the coach, Lionel Scaloni, how he thought his country should be playing.
He used tactical ideas Guardiola had installed at City, even using specific Guardiola terminology. Word got back to the City boss, who declared, “My work with Sergio is done”.
They have a great relationship now, no doubt aided by a cheeky sense of humour that always helps in a dressing-room environment.
“It’s his character, he makes jokes, he laughs at a lot of things, he laughs at himself too,” Torrent says. “He’s not a guy who talks a lot but when he talks he has his own touch, his sense of humour, the English have a very subtle sense of humour and it’s like that. Sometimes when things aren’t going so well he can make people laugh with a little joke.”
Probably the most publicly available example is a video from the away dressing room at Turf Moor in December, with the squad and staff assembled for a celebratory picture. As the group disbands, Aguero shouts “Mashallah”, an Arabic phrase that means ‘God has willed it’, which cracks everybody up, especially Riyad Mahrez.
Last weekend, before City’s FA Cup tie against Port Vale, he spotted Nicolas Otamendi’s yellow puffer jacket and said to a member of staff, “Hey, boludo , it looks like the life jacket from a plane”.
Caballero provides some other examples: “What I remember is that all the time he was checking social media to see what happened during the last game to bring into the changing room to laugh about. All the time he was bringing to the changing room phrases or whatever happened in the last game that was funny, about the players or about the referee or whatever.”
When he, Aymeric Laporte, Brahim Diaz and other friends went to Mykonos in 2018, Aguero paid for the lot.
Yet the picture painted by the Amazon documentary of City’s 2017-18 season offered a different, perhaps heartbreaking glimpse into Aguero’s life away from his team-mates. “My son Benjamin lives with his mother in Argentina, but most of the time I’m on my own,” he says.
Aguero added recently: “The respect and affection I receive (in Manchester) means a lot to me. It’s never easy to be far from my family, and, especially, from my son Benjamin.”
Lescott says there is an especially fun-loving side to Aguero whenever his son is in town: “Benji is his life and soul, so every opportunity he got to come over he would come. I think you see the best of Sergio when he is with his little boy, but obviously circumstances prevent them being together. We always knew when Benji was over. There was always a spring in his step.”
Still, Aguero’s life is not so bad. He has an apartment in Manchester but home is Hale. If he’s not enjoying a meal with friends nearby, he’ll be on the PlayStation, usually playing FIFA or Fortnite — when Argentina played in Manchester in 2018, he and Lionel Messi played Fortnite at City’s lodgings. They also dropped in on a youth team training session, a moment described as “pandemonium”.
The background noise at home is either provided by Liam Gallagher, Argentine cumbia artists, or the constant updates of Sky Sports News. Weirdly, one of the TV shows he has come to enjoy during his time in England is… Only Fools And Horses.
His house is often the meeting place when his City team-mates want to gather. Initially, he spent plenty of time with Tevez and Pablo Zabaleta, who were at the club when he arrived, and in recent years Caballero and Otamendi have been regulars. United goalkeeper David de Gea is a good friend, too.
“Of course we spent a lot of time together doing a barbecue because he loves a barbecue; we love it, we did them at his house,” Caballero says. Unlike Tevez, who did them indoors and damaged the walls and roof of his house, Aguero has a specially built area, although in 2016, for a while at least, he cut out meat and fizzy drinks after visiting the same dietitian as Messi.
There have been plenty of women in Aguero’s life since he and Benjamin’s mother, Giannina Maradona, split. He was said to be close to moving in with a girlfriend last year, but is now with somebody else. The paparazzi fight so hard to get pictures of Aguero and his love interests that one time they thought they had found a new woman on the scene, only for it to turn out to be his sister.
“Nothing was coming out of him drinking, going out nightclubbing, we had no sense of him potentially giving us any issues,” Marwood says of the background work City did on him back in 2011, which begs the question: did he pick up those habits in Manchester? Aguero certainly likes a night out — at the right time, of course, and he doesn’t drink beer, preferring gin and tonic.
Anyway, you don’t become the Premier League’s all-time overseas top goalscorer by partying too much and getting yourself into trouble, you don’t have the best minutes-per-goal in Premier League history if you’re not wonderfully talented and dedicated to your craft.
With a goal every 106.5 minutes, he is comfortably ahead of the other strikers to have more than 100 goals, like Harry Kane (120.6), Thierry Henry (121.8) and Robin van Persie (139.7), and newer kids on the block like Gabriel Jesus (123.2), Pierre Emerick-Aubameyang (124.6) and Mohamed Salah (124.9).
Aguero, quite simply, is a goalscoring machine with the intelligence and work ethic to evolve and move with the times.
“He’s probably always been able to do what he’s been doing now, but he was never asked,” Lescott says. “People say he’s working harder under Pep, but I’m like he was never asked to work any harder than he did.
“That was the weird thing about his goal against QPR. It started off with him coming short to get the ball, obviously I never thought it at the time but he never did that, that’s not what he did.
“He would be like, ‘Stay up top, the ball will come, and I’ll score,’ but obviously because we had everybody on, Edin, Mario, Vinny was causing a nuisance up there, he’s come short to create a little bit of space and obviously he’s been able to drift into that space to score the goal, but that wasn’t something you would associate with Sergio.”
It is now, of course, and it goes to show that there’s always been more to Aguero than meets the eye.
1 Like