Eight minutes into the match, after Eberechi Eze had calmly side-footed the ball over an undefended goal line to give Crystal Palace an early lead, I had for the first time this season the feeling that Manchester City really might not get off the mat.
Throughout City’s season from hell, it has always felt like the squad was too strong, the manager too great, and the team too experienced to end the year in truly disastrous fashion by finishing outside of the Champions League places. Surely the midseason slump would eventually come to an end. Surely the superstars we’ve watched dominate the best league in the world in unprecedented fashion would finally find some form. Surely, even after it had become clear that there would be no magical click that would transform this team into the swaggering City of old, the Citizens would eventually stop bleeding points, play some simply decent soccer, and nab one of the Premier League’s five Champions League spots. But then Eze put Palace ahead in what was for City a must-win home game, and I looked at the standings of this preposterously tight EPL top-five race, and I had to confront the idea that maybe City wouldn’t ever wake up from this nightmare.
Then, just 13 minutes after that opening goal and those thoughts of doom, Palace scored again.
But for as bad as things are, Man City still has Kevin De Bruyne. And even at this age, in this season, in his final months with the club, Kevin De Bruyne can still be Kevin De Bruyne.
At his peak, De Bruyne—who announced just over a week ago that he will be leaving City this summer after 10 years with the club—was a player defined by three attributes: ball-striking precision, physicality, and vision. De Bruyne has never been particularly creative in the true sense of inventing new, unexpected solutions to problems as they arise. If De Bruyne could be described as imaginative it is in his ability to envision any given scenario as a nail to which he could apply his hammer, the tool he relied on almost exclusively: his ability to kick the everliving soul out of the ball and have it fly to within a millimeter of where he intended. He married the power and perfection of his strikes on the ball and an eagle’s view of passing lanes, with a long, incredibly powerful stride and a seemingly literal tirelessness. This is the rare player whose game could be decently encapsulated just by an audio reel—heavy footfalls, a long stretch of panting, the thud of the ball, the crowd’s cheers.
His combination of skills meant De Bruyne could sprint as much in 90 minutes as most midfielders might run across two games, and granted him the ability to hit inch-perfect passes at silly angles even while running at full tilt. Ninety percent of De Bruyne’s highlights might therefore look exactly the same—him bombing down the pitch with the ball, booming out a pass onto a teammate’s bombing run, and said teammate booming the ball into the net—but never has it been more thrilling to watch a hammer drive home nail after nail after nail with such staggering consistency, fluidity, and grace.
Injury absences—Rodri’s chief among them—are probably the biggest culprit for the Citizens’ multifaceted collapse this season, but for De Bruyne the issue goes even deeper. The Belgian has only been healthy enough to start 14 of City’s 32 league games, robbing the team of its best-ever player for nearly half of its matches. But absence aside, the more significant impact has been what those injuries, and the others he’s struggled with in recent seasons, have done to his game as a whole. De Bruyne is no longer the ironman capable of bombing up and down the pitch without end. The injuries and the years seem to have stripped the 33-year-old of that explosiveness and stamina, and without them he is nowhere near as effective as before. Part of the disappointment of this season has been not only missing De Bruyne’s presence on the pitch, but seeing how limited this De Bruyne is when sapped of the physical advantages that once made him so special.
It was fitting, then, that the moment that changed the game for City against Crystal Palace came from a De Bruyne free kick. Even if KDB can no longer run like before, he’s still more than capable of clobbering the ball and sending it right where he wants it. And so, in the 33rd minute, standing over a dead ball some 25 yards out, De Bruyne hit the ball as purely and accurately as ever, and halved City’s deficit.
While I don’t think you could rightly say City played with its usual authority and threat following De Bruyne’s goal, the team definitely regained something of its traditional confidence and resolve. That too is something City has sorely missed from De Bruyne this year.
While it’s impossible to argue with Pep Guardiola’s record of success, I do think it’s fair to wonder if such a meticulously blackboarded style of play disempowers players to act when the going gets tough. If the players have it drilled into their minds that the coach’s system is the source of all answers, during those inevitable times when the system isn’t working and the coach can’t fix it, it stands to reason that the players might struggle to take matters into their own hands. De Bruyne, however, has always seemed like the exception, the one Citizen of this generation who was always determined to assume responsibility for what was happening on the pitch, with the personality to break from the manager’s instructions, the talent to wrest control of a match by himself, and the superior point of view from inside the game to realize when he had to apply said talent and personality. Guardiola has clearly not had any answer for how to fix what ails Man City this season, and most of the big players you might expect to step into that void have instead wilted. But in the Palace match, you could get a glimpse of what a healthy, strong-willed De Bruyne could do for this team.
Buoyed by De Bruyne’s free kick, City got its equalizer on almost the very next attack. Again De Bruyne was involved, getting inside the six-yard box and heading a cross down to Ilkay Gündogan, who was awarded the assist on Omar Marmoush’s followup shot only because he badly mishit De Bruyne’s setup. It was like the olden days of, uh, exactly one year ago, when City could go down a goal or even two and yet never lose the sense that an avalanche of goals was just a kick away.
The Mancs went into halftime level but with all the momentum. The intermission did nothing to impede this, since City scored the go-ahead goal almost straight out of the break. Again it was De Bruyne in the box teeing up a teammate (he started the match nominally as City’s striker, so it wasn’t a surprise to see him in such advanced positions), this time Mateo Kovacic, who sliced a low shot into the Palace goal. The party was on from then. James McAtee scored a fourth nine minutes later, Nico O’Reilly got a fifth in the 79th minute, and City looked more like scoring seven than conceding three. The Eagles, who had looked so formidable in that first half an hour, played out the final hour utterly declawed.
The three points put Man City into fourth place. Results since then—a Chelsea draw, a Newcastle win—dropped them a spot into fifth, but with renewed vigor ahead of what is sure to be a hard-fought run-in. City probably has the easiest remaining schedule of the five teams vying for the three UCL spots behind Liverpool and Arsenal. They also have a healthy, strong-willed, and motivated De Bruyne, who is sure to want to leave Manchester with a bang. This false 9 position he’s been playing recently looks to be a great fit for the player he is today, compensating for his declining athleticism by leaving him closer to goal, where his enduring vision and ball-striking can still take over matches.
City is into the semis of the F.A. Cup, and a win in that competition would be an appropriately sterling send-off for the most decorated, most iconic player in the club’s history. But the team’s most important job is to finish in the top five. And there’s never been anyone better at getting Manchester City exactly where he wants them to be than Kevin De Bruyne.
