BHOYS SMILES BETTER
Dundee Utd Celtic
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Today, 12pm
MOHAMED ELYOUNOUSSI wants Celtic to keep on the winning track as they emerge from a turbulent few months.
Neil Lennon resigned as manager last month and assistant John Kennedy began his tenure as interim Bhoys boss with a 1-0 home win over Aberdeen last
Saturday. Now Norway international Elyounoussi (below) is looking to keep the feelgood factor going.
He said: “Kendo has been doing a really good job, there’s a lot of positivity and the boys are smiling again.
“We take one game at a time. Winning the remaining games is our goal and we take it from there.”
AS soon as Manchester City wrap up Premier League formalities, attention will turn to other matters.
There will be a debate about whether they can truly be considered a great team if they do not go on to win the Champions League.
The Quadruple – because they will probably seal the title win while still in all other competitions – will be talked of even more animatedly and there will be broader discussions.
People will wonder out loud if their prospective dominance is good for the sport and City fans might consider how long Pep Guardiola will stay and if he will be joined by Lionel Messi and/or Erling Haaland.
But, as Easter approaches, there will also be chat about which City player deserves extra individual accolades. Presuming City’s inexorable march continues, the main end-ofseason awards can surely only go to one of their players.
They do not have to. There have been outstanding contributions throughout the 20 clubs to a strange Premier League season.
Jack Grealish has been at his mercurial best, the numbers of Bruno Fernandes tell their own story, Heung-Min Son and Harry Kane have been excellent for Spurs and so on and so on.
But it will be a City player who takes the honours, which in itself is a bit of an irony considering Guardiola’s success is built on having a squad made up almost entirely of interchangeable players.
Your Footballer of the Year could well be someone who is not 100 per cent guaranteed a starting place in the City team.
Your Footballer of the Year could well be John Stones.
He will probably start against Manchester United, but if Guardiola opted for a central-defensive
partnership of
Ruben Dias and Aymeric Laporte, it would not raise much of an eyebrow.
Yet City have only conceded more than one goal in a single Premier League game on two occasions this season – when they were beaten 5-2 by Leicester at the Etihad and 2-0 by Spurs in London.
And Stones did not feature in either of those games.
Not only is his defensive record mightily impressive, he has also contributed three league goals.
City’s side is stocked with worthy candidates for personal accolades. It is easier to name those who would not be thoroughly deserving than those who would.
Ilkay Gundogan has flourished spectacularly, Joao Cancelo has introduced a new role to the English game.
But the Stones renaissance has been one of THE stories of City’s season.
This is a player who has had his professional and personal confidence tested over the last couple of years.
It is easy to give credit to Guardiola for the re-blossoming of Stones.
But when he sanctioned the £40million purchase of Nathan Ake, it hardly smacked of immense confidence in a player who had also fallen out of favour with a national boss whom he served so well at World Cup 2018.
No, Stones’s excellence in this remarkable City campaign can be wholly credited to his own determination, his own drive, his own willingness to work even harder at his game.
Like most, he has ferocious competition to get into City’s team and he has embraced it.
Of course, it is far too early to be handing out individual gongs, but if Stones continues to stand tall in this immense collective City effort, then his name simply must be in the frame at the end of the season.