IT’S KEVIN HELP LIVERPOOL NOW
Four-goal hero leaves Klopp saying prayers
THEY say it is the most competitive league in the world, the toughest in the world, the fastest, the most physical, a brutal battleground.
Well, how come Kevin de Bruyne makes everything look so downright easy?
How come he plays a game with which most of his opponents are not familiar?
How come he is never less than one smooth step ahead of everyone else?
If he had a decent right foot, he would be one heck of a footballer. Only kidding, of course.
But just in case anyone out there might not know the full range of his sublime talent, De Bruyne actually went mostly left peg to put one Manchester City foot onto the Premier League winners’ podium ahead of Liverpool.
Three clinical finishes inside 24 minutes, game over, and only four points needed from fixtures against West Ham and Aston Villa to guarantee a fourth title in five years.
And no-one has contributed more to City’s dominance than De Bruyne. Or to give him his full Premier League name … Kevin De Bruyne Man of the Match.
Quite frankly, the first ten minutes of this match were too easy for De Bruyne and his team-mates.
Perhaps it was a Bruno Lage masterplan – the old false-sense-ofsecurity trick. Maybe waving De Bruyne down a boulevard through the centre of defence was part of the scheme. Whatever, De Bruyne happily bought into it, gliding on to a Bernardo Silva pass and casually popping a left-foot finish beyond Jose Sa.
But then came the sucker punch, a counter-attack involving Raul Jimenez and Pedro Neto and finished by Leander Dendoncker.
There was as much puzzlement as celebration around Molineux but sanity was soon restored.
And there were no prizes for guessing who brought order back to proceedings. De Bruyne’s dinked pass towards Raheem Sterling forced a Sa wobble and the Belgian
followed up to dispatch his second before completing a hat-trick with a beauty.
This time, it was a cut inside from the right and the purest of hits from the edge of the penalty area.
Before Phil Foden joined the celebrating scrum, he smiled and shook his head at the audacity of his colleague. No wonder.
But the strange thing is that Guardiola needed De Bruyne to be inspired because if Jurgen Klopp wants to clutch at a straw or two, he could hope that West Ham or Villa punish a makeshift City defence that looked all at sea almost every time Wolves sprung a forward move. Maybe that is why Guardiola still cut an anxious figure for most of the game, visibly frustrated when a Sterling effort was ruled out by a hair’s-breadth offside decision.
Oleksandr Zinchenko, in particular, had a torrid time. For all De Bruyne’s brilliance, this City team – with its defensive absentees – is vulnerable.
And they will be even more vulnerable without Aymeric Laporte, who will surely now join John Stones and Ruben Dias in missing the rest of the season after picking up a nasty-looking injury.
Still, it does not matter how vulnerable City are when De Bruyne is in this mood, and Sterling helped himself to a late fifth.