Golden De Bruyne has the talent to claim the greatest prize of all
HARRY KANE and Mo Salah have their merits as potential Player of the Year award winners.
But that honour has to go to Kevin De Bruyne.
He has been weighing in with goals and important assists at important times in games all season.
His level of consistency has been outstanding.
All he really needs to do now is in the latter stages in Europe, rubber-stamp that with a couple of important goals, important assists and I think it will be all over bar the shouting for Player of the Year.
I saw one article saying they feel at Manchester City that he should be in the reckoning for a Ballon d’Or shout and I wouldn’t disagree with that.
As a player you make your choices to be able to get the best out of yourself.
And he has gone to Manchester City knowing they are always going to spend big on top-quality forwards to play in around him.
But he has also fallen lucky with his national team which, of course, can’t buy players. Having some of the talent he gets to play with for Belgium means I bet he cannot wait to play for them too. He could well finish at the end of the season, if Belgium get anywhere near the kind of level they look capable of, by getting to the last eight or maybe even the last four of the World Cup. If De Bruyne can get Manchester City into the later stages of the Champions League too that will be a very persuasive Ballon d’Or argument. Football is a really easy game and he knows what is happening around him. When you pick up the ball 15 or 20 yards outside the box you have to know what you want to do with it. I played with some players who were very good at that, like Bryan Roy at Nottingham Forest, Steve McManaman at Liverpool and Robbie Fowler was also excellent at being able to get his head up and know where he would want to run as a striker so would be able to play the pass to you.
Lars Bohinen was exceptional at Forest at being able to pick out a pass.
He’d pick his head up and say, ‘That’s where I’m going to put it, that’s where I anticipate Stan is going to get on the end of it, happy days’ and a lot of goals came from it. And I did likewise with Fowler.
When you have players like Gabriel Jesus and Sergio Aguero, as De Bruyne has at City, you put the ball into an area.
People say, ‘Oh wow, that’s pinpoint passing’ but very rarely as an attacking player when you pick your head up are you looking to find somebody’s head or feet.
You put it into an area where you know the player has the ability to get there ahead of his defender.
That’s what he does exceptionally well.
Going back to when I was a kid, players like Glenn Hoddle, Paul Gascoigne, Matt Le Tissier had that ability and to put De Bruyne’s passing into that kind of company shows how highly I rate him.