? De Bruyne

> The Belgian is the most complete player in the league but must prove it consistently <

KEVIN DE BRUYNE is the most complete player in the Premier League. He has everything you would want from a modern midfielder, even more so than Paul Pogba, and the £55m Manchester City paid for him is cheap in today’s market. Players that good do not show up too often.

But De Bruyne turned 26 on Wednesday and it is reasonable to ask whether this coming season, his third in Manchester, will be when we finally see the very best of the man Pep Guardiola wants to build his team around.

Because there is still a nagging sense with De Bruyne that he has not yet produced the complete top-level season that he is capable of. In his first season under Manuel Pellegrini, De Bruyne did well enough in flashes in an underperforming team but not consistently. He missed more than two months with a knee injury sustained in January 2016.

Yes, De Bruyne scored a brilliant winner against Paris Saint Germain to get City into the semi-finals of the Champions League. No Manchester City player had ever won a Champions League quarter-final second leg for them before, it must be said. But no City player had cost £55m either. De Bruyne comes with his own fresh standards.

It was only when Guardiola replaced Pellegrini that De Bruyne could fairly be judged. It was the prospect of working with Guardiola, after all, that helped encourage De Bruyne to pick City in 2015. Guardiola started with De Bruyne in the middle of a 4-3-3 system, alongside David Silva, trying to take advantage of the two best football brains around.

It started so well and for the first few months of last season, De Bruyne was the best player in the country. He destroyed Manchester United at Old Trafford and was the best player on the pitch when City beat Barcelona 3-1 at home, scoring a free-kick and creating City’s third goal.

City felt like likely champions and De Bruyne like the footballer of the year, no more so than when they were 1-0 up and dominating Antonio Conte’s Chelsea at the Etihad Stadium in early December. Early in the second half De Bruyne had an open goal chance to make it 2-0. He hit the bar, City lost 3-1. Chelsea won the title, City finished third. Who knows what would have happened had it gone in.

In the real world De Bruyne’s season went downhill from there. He was moved out of central midfield as Guardiola continued to tweak to find his best team. He put in plenty of shifts out on the wing, which he does not especially enjoy, as Guardiola tried to get more bodies into the middle of the pitch. He even played left wing-back once in a game at Leicester. City lost 4-2.

There were moments in the second half of the season when De Bruyne threatened to get back to the level he had showed before. He was very good as City took West Ham United apart at the London Stadium, and brilliant for a 3-0 win at Southampton on 15 April.

But in the weeks that decided City’s season, De Bruyne struggled. They went out of the Champions League to Monaco, out of the FA Cup to Arsenal, and stumbled in the Premier League too, taking two points from a crucial threegame run against Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea. There is a theory that De Bruyne does not bring his best displays for the biggest games, and he did not exactly dispel it this spring.

It was another Belgian, Eden Hazard, who finished the season as the best attacking player in the country. N’Golo Kante beat him to the individual awards, so Hazard had to make do with his second Premier League medal instead.

Hazard is only six months older than De Bruyne but he made the switch from top talent to top player around the age of 24. He knows what it means to be decisive over and over and over again, when his teammates are struggling but the biggest prizes are on the line. De Bruyne is no less gifted than Hazard but it is time for him to show he is on the same level. – The Independent