Riyad Mahrez happy to stay and take his chances at Manchester City
Riyad Mahrez had no doubt he would take his chance to fire Manchester City towards the Premier League title after his unexpected selection at Brighton on Sunday and does not have any intention of leaving the club in order to play more often.
It has been a patchy first season with the champions for Mahrez, who arrived from Leicester for £60m last July and had started only 13 top-flight games before Pep Guardiola threw him into the decisive match at the Amex Stadium. That gamble was rewarded when Mahrez scored an outstanding goal to put City 3-1 up, in effect settling the outcome, and it was the kind of impact he felt positive about making.
“It’s not easy to come to a team who are settled and have the players who play,” he said. “That squad did everything last season. I knew it wouldn’t be easy in my first year but I’m very confident in myself and have no doubts about my quality. I knew that, when I had my chance, I’d take it. I scored at Brighton and helped the team.”
Three years ago Mahrez starred in Leicester’s stunning title success and that experience, along with what Guardiola described as “his quality, his personality, his lack of fear”, may have been a factor in the manager’s decision to turn to him for a first appearance in over a month. He had been an unused substitute for their previous six games, at a crucial and hectic point of the season, but does not consider it a reason to seek his fortune elsewhere.
“I’m very happy here,” Mahrez said. “I’m not going somewhere else because I don’t play. It’s part of the game. I need to be strong, stay strong. It’s part of my personality. I never hide from things.”
It was tempting to frame Mahrez’s 63rd-minute goal as a moment of redemption given that, when City played Liverpool at Anfield in October, he blazed a late penalty over the bar. Had Liverpool pipped City on Sunday it would have been an obvious incident to focus on but he insisted it never played on his mind in the intervening months.
“No, of course if I scored we would have had two more points but in some games I scored and we won 1-0. So we’re not going to count everything; it’s about what we did.”