‘NO MESSI? NO PROBLEM!’
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE MANCHESTER CITY STAR
THE bad news for Manchester City’s Premier League rivals is that Kevin de Bruyne is planning to stick around a while. The worse news is that last season’s PFA Player of the Year is still feeling sore about missing out on the league title.
Winners don’t like losing and De Bruyne is no exception. Back in training for just one day after City’s fruitless participation in the Champions League, the desire to make good the mistakes of the last campaign lives strong.
‘The hunger is there every day, every time,’ De Bruyne told
Sportsmail.
‘It never moves. Last season we had the most goals scored and almost the least conceded but we didn’t win the league, did we?
‘In the end we were so far behind because we made so many mistakes at both ends. It can’t happen again.’
De Bruyne is talking via Zoom from his home in Cheshire. Behind him on a sideboard is the PFA trophy presented to him this week. The first City player to ever win it, it feels rather overdue.
The Belgian, 29 now, is grateful if maybe not overwhelmed. The big stuff is the team trophies and he has his eye on some more. A father of three after wife Michele gave birth to a little girl, Suri, last week, he sees his long-term future in Manchester.
‘Mummy and daughter are doing fine and my two sons can’t leave her alone,’ he smiled.
‘We had her in Manchester. All three were born here. We are very happy here in Manchester.
‘We are still in the same house we bought when I came. We renovated it. So my family is happy and my son goes to school for the third year already.
‘Everything is going fine.’
De Bruyne has been at City for five seasons now. He has won two Premier Leagues and five domestic cups. The big miss is the Champions League and his irritation at City somehow losing to unfancied Lyon in the quarter-final in Portugal last month was evident by the simmering TV interview he gave immediately afterwards. ‘It’s not good enough,’ he said, and he was right. Now, four weeks on, he claims to have let the anger go. He is not a player to dwell too much on the good or the bad for long. Tellingly, though, he knows there will be no change in Pep Guardiola’s approach as City launch another assault in 2020-21. Guardiola was criticised for over-thinking tactics against Lyon but De Bruyne (left) said: ‘The way he looks at football is different to how many people look at football. He has his philosophy and he stays with it and doesn’t change. ‘There is Plan A and there is Plan A. ‘There is no Plan B. For a lot of people that’s difficult to understand.’ Asked if there are moments when players sometimes hanker after a change in the style of music,
De Bruyne was honest.
‘That can happen in your mind but afterwards you know that Plan A mostly works for us,’ he said. ‘I think everybody is really confident [in the plan] though you are always going to say in any moment of time in a game that you want ‘this’ or ‘this’. Or we should do ‘that’.
‘But that happens in every club. It’s good to have these discussions because you just need to win the game and sometimes the coach can say whatever he wants.
‘If a player just does something and it helps the team win he will be happy.’ The immediate challenge for Guardiola’s players is to win the Premier League title back from Liverpool.
The winning margin for Jurgen Klopp’s team last time round was a staggering 18 points. City have strengthened this summer while Liverpool have not done so significantly. De Bruyne does not expect their rivals’ levels to drop and expects other teams to enter the debate after activity in the market.
Equally, he knows how hard it is to defend a title. When City did so two seasons ago, they had to reach 98 points to pip Liverpool by one.
‘It is really hard, yeh,’ he admitted. ‘It was harder than we expected and we needed a very big fight with them to get it done.
‘Mentally sometimes it’s tougher. Some teams are a little more focused on beating you.
‘Sometimes some people find it more difficult after winning to get that same feeling again.
‘It is very difficult to recreate the same feeling even with the same team.
‘There is so much in life that goes on personally. Every little thing can change you. Injury can change you. Football is all about circumstances and it’s already difficult enough to try and win one, never mind twice.
‘I think they [Liverpool] can reach the levels again. I don’t think you need to change the team to have the same feeling or ambition.But I don’t know how they feel. I don’t know their desire. For everyone it is personal.
‘Sometimes when you win something you can feel less. Sometimes it can give you extra hunger. So it’s difficult to know. Let’s see.’
WHILE Michele de Bruyne was in labour, her husband’s employers were trying to sign Lionel Messi. That would have been some new colleague to return to work with.
‘To be honest I didn’t really think about it,’ De Bruyne dead panned. ‘If it could have happened, it would have happened.
‘If you can get Messi to your team you are always going to do it. I can see it from a playing perspective and especially as a club.
‘Business wise, the amount of sponsors and money it would have attracted would have been huge.
‘Even if you would have paid him a load of money, in a certain way you would get it all back. So I could understand the decision (to try) in that respect.’
It’s a mature take on it by De Bruyne, but the bit where he says he never thought about it? Really? Not even for a second. ‘I really don’t care,’ he said. ‘I really don’t. If he would have come it would have helped us because, for me, he has been the