HOW MAHREZ POWERED CHARGE TO EURO FINAL
FOR a player once labelled too skinny, workshy and a one-trick pony, Riyad Mahrez has not done too badly.
He is already in a group of just 10 players to have picked up a Premier League winner’s medal with two different clubs.
But, as Mahrez stated when joining Manchester City three years ago, he made the move from Leicester with his eyes on only one thing – the biggest prize in club football, the Champions League.
“I made the decision to come here because I want to be part of that,” he said in 2018. “The Champions League is for big clubs. City are a big club and they have everything to try and win it.”
Mahrez, 30, has been key in City’s increasingly sure-footed march towards Istanbul. In the past four knockout games he has two assists and four goals.
Not just any goals either, taking the responsibility to equalise from the penalty spot – with Kevin De Bruyne looking on – against Borussia Dortmund in the quarter-final, and scoring three times against Paris Saint-Germain to put them in the final.
Pep Guardiola will have selection headaches for the final in Turkey but right wing will not be one. A player who the City
manager once described having “no muscles” has transformed into a performer even he would pay to watch.
“He has a special quality. He is a guy who dances on the pitch,” said Guardiola recently.
“He doesn’t lose the ball, he attracts opponents with his as movements. He’s a fantastic player and hopefully he can continue this way.”
It is a far cry from playing in the French seventh tier, or when he used to be hauled off weekly by his coach at Ligue 2 side Le Havre for not tracking back.
But Mahrez has met every challenge that is thrown at him. Raised in Sarcelles, north of Paris, he lost his father to a heart attack aged 15 and admits he played football to keep himself off the streets.
With seventh-tier side Quimper, he shared a tiny flat with Paul Pogba’s brother Mathias. In 2014, he moved from Le Havre to Leicester for £400,000. Two years after that, came his first title.
Mahrez was set on City from the moment he knew Guardiola rated him. After a stop-start pursuit, City paid a then club-record £60million for his wizardry.
In his first season there, Mahrez started just 14 games and was hauled off in all but one of them, his workrate not up to Guardiola’s standards.
It is safe to say there has been improvement.
Mahrez’s team-mates still laugh at his attempts to win the ball in the air but his tracking back is good now, a last-ditch block to deny Neymar in the first leg against PSG a case in point.
His work at the other end is beyond reproach with 14 goals this season and seven assists.
Should Mahrez secure a Champions League winner’s medal, he will become one of only six to have won titles with two clubs and Europe’s top competition.
Not bad for a lightweight, lazy, one-trick pony.