Kev’s floating as Jack sinks
VERDICT FROM ST MARY’S STADIUM
WHEN Kevin De Bruyne floated a delicious free-kick into Southampton’s penalty area midway through the second half, it wasn’t so much inchperfect as to-the-millimetre.
The precision of the set-piece certainly confused the life out of poor Saints keeper Fraser Forster, who didn’t know whether to stick or twist in terms of coming to get it.
To be fair him, there probably wasn’t a right answer to that.
But his momentary hesitation was all Aymeric Laporte needed to accept De
Bruyne’s invitation to head home and deny Southampton a victory they would not have deserved.
Ralph Hasenhuttl’s men played well and plenty of Saints fans will argue their firsthalf performance alone merited the point they did get.
But as well as they played — and Oriol Romeu and Armando Broja were excellent, as were several others — De Bruyne, yet again, was peerless.
The Belgian is that special kind of player who turns defeats into draws and draws into wins.
Sometimes with a goal, as he did against Chelsea last week, and sometimes with an assist.
This time it was the latter – and he’s one of those few players in the Premier League who possesses that X factor.
If the club will struggle to find a replacement for Pep
Guardiola when he eventually goes then the search for a player to eventually fill De Bruyne’s boots will be every bit as challenging.
De Bruyne’s mate, Jack
Grealish, is another of those X-factor players but, yet again, he looked a shell of the player that he was as Aston Villa’s mischief-maker in chief.
Deployed as a false nine, it’s hard not to feel sympathy with him – Guardiola’s decision to start him through the middle was another reminder that football must be the only industry in which £100million can be spent on a tool which isn’t used for the job it does.
Grealish is a stunning player when his tail is up, but he found himself running down blind alleys and trying passes so intricate with Raheem Sterling that they were never going to find a way through.
He’s not a back-togoal player and never has been.
Guardiola has an embarrassment of attacking riches to hang his hat on. City were far more threatening when Gabriel Jesus replaced Sterling, even if he did put the Brazil striker on the flank instead of switching Grealish out there.
But that just went to show how dangerous they will be if City do get Harry Kane or Erling Haaland in the summer.
In fact, if there has been a game all season which highlighted the City boss’s need for a central striker — and, look, it’s not exactly a desperate situation, is it? — it was this one.
Broja caused City problems all evening, and it’s fun to imagine how many he would rack up if he played week-in, week-out in front of De Bruyne in this sort of form.
‘‘
Yet again Grealish looked a shell of the player he was during his mischiefmaking days at Aston Villa