[ad_1]
Just over two minutes before the moment that will forever define his career, Manchester City hero Sergio Agüero showed sharpness in the Queens Park Rangers goal that would not have been out of place at Old Trafford.
Old Trafford Cricket Ground – that is, right at the end of City’s bitter rivals and its eponymous home.
When Edin Dzeko’s equalizer from David Silva’s right corner recovered from the net, Agüero jumped in, snapping him in as a quick silver short-leg fielder and returning to the center circle for the City’s final tilt to the unlikely.
Certainly, there was nothing wrong with the striker’s move after Joey Barton brazenly attempted to kill him, one of the many surreal and key incidents that fueled a frantic and famous race against the clock on May 13, 2012.
*********************
The whole story is now as worn as any in football history.
On the cusp of a top-notch first title in 44 years, Robert Mancini’s Manchester City faced the QPR threatened by relegation on the last day of the season. In their previous 18 Premier League home games that season, they won 17 and tied for the other, the most recent of which was a 1-0 win over United that threw a titanic Mancunian fight towards the blue side of town. .
City simply needed to match United’s result at Sunderland and led 1-0 in the interval thanks to Pablo Zabaleta, only for second-half goals by Djibril Cisse and Jamie Mackie to turn the fight around.
It remained 2-1 before the detention time despite the fact that QPR operates with 10 men. City youth product Barton was fired for fighting Carlos Tevez and responded to Mike Dean’s red card by hitting his knee on Agüero’s thigh before targeting Vincent Kompany. Fireworks enthusiast Mario Balotelli poured some gasoline into this particular bonfire as he faced Scouser fuel as he walked into the tunnel.
Aside from that major stain, QPR’s discipline was impeccable. Despite giving up 81.3 overall possession and 84.1 percent during the second half, they only committed seven fouls. The stoppages were infrequent when the City shook and stirred with increasing despair and diminished art around the opposition penalty area.
Without Barton’s collapse, there is little chance that five minutes of halting time has been noted, or the three minutes and 20 seconds it ultimately required. It was time City desperately needed and time they could take advantage of the fast-twitch fibers of their top scorer.
*********************
Barton was not the only QPR man with connections to the city. His teammates Shaun Wright-Phillips and Nedum Onuoha also graduated through Jim Cassell’s Platt Lane youth system, while Rangers boss Mark Hughes was Mancini’s immediate predecessor, as he was fired shortly before Christmas in 2009.
Hughes, of course, also played for United with distinction in two spells, and those loyalties struck a chord when news came that Bolton Wanderers had failed to beat Stoke City, meaning Londoners were safe regardless of result in the Etihad Stadium.
“[City] I went back to the levels and I always remember, at the time, I knew we were safe because the other result came, “he said to the coaches’ voice earlier this year.
“I’m thinking, ‘I wouldn’t mind winning United if I’m honest.’ It’s 2-2 and Jay Bothroyd looked, asking what we wanted them to do. [from the restart]. The players understood the [Bolton] The game was over and we were awake. We just said kick it as far as you can, right in the corner and the game is over. “
Hughes’s memories of that point give City a balance they lacked. On rare occasions, a team may have scored twice in this two-minute space and, except for a few crucial seconds, has played so categorically.
Bothroyd’s helmet found contact and Joe Joe ran out of his goal to serve. The England goalkeeper almost missed the shot.
Gael Clichy carried the ball to the flank, only to have his attempt to cross become a block tackle with Mackie. Samir Nasri’s aimless and floating effort that followed did little more than give Clint Hill a successful ninth afternoon punt.
Nasri then stood out by passing the ball to a QPR serve. Only 40 seconds before that ecstatic explosion there was fury and anguish in the stands. Agüero watched everything from about the QPR penalty point. Apparently he had seen enough.
*********************
Now 31 years old and the City’s top scorer of all time, Agüero honed his lethal skills by playing against older children in Buenos Aires in the Potrero neighborhood: the fields of hard gravel and mud that soccer purists in Argentina lament are a less and less presence.
“When you play you have to think fast. Who to face, who not,” Agüero said, recalling those days in a 2018 documentary for the city’s internal television channel. “You know who will play dirty, who won’t.
“You start to realize what you can do on the field and what you can’t do.”
Reflecting further on Pol Ballus and Lu Martin’s 2019 book ‘Pep’s City’, he explained the testing ground that set him up for Barton and others.
“Being kicked in black and blue was part of the game,” he said. “You held on to the ball as best you could.
“Running with the ball was a completely different concept for us. I would take on big, tough guys and I was always the smallest. But I learned to survive.”
Agüero recalled that those games were played for a peso, which would give him one of his favorite treats, an alfajor or dulce de leche.
As United’s players took full time and three points at the Stadium of Light, and Nigel de Jong advanced the ball in Manchester to the soundtrack of the QPR celebrations, his fans aware of Bolton’s fate, the stakes were somewhat older.
Vacating his place in a penalty area already crowded by substitutes Dzeko and Balotelli, along with a marauding Kompany, Agüero took possession of De Jong 30 yards from goal.
He faced a compact lap four QPR, with the four visiting midfielders in close proximity.
“You start to realize what you can do on the field and what you can’t do.”
A shuffling tap to his left engineering space outside of Shaun Derry, but Agüero needed help. Ideally from someone trustworthy, given the total lack of any margin for error.
*********************
Balotelli was on the field in a Manchester City jersey for the first time in over a month.
Mancini had not trusted his rebel protégé since a brainless red card in a 1-0 loss on Easter Sunday at Arsenal left the City eight points behind United with six games to play. Tevez, who had spent most of the AWOL campaign playing golf in Argentina, represented a much more reliable option.
But with nowhere to turn, he dared and prayed that Mario would be super. However briefly.
Introduced in the 76th minute, Balotelli gave the impression that he had been ejected not only from the Premier League stadiums, but also from football fields since his previous game.
The Italian striker managed to make seven attempts, two on target, five blocked, during a frantic cameo. It was probably better that Agüero found him with his back to the goal, inside the D and fighting with Anton Ferdinand.
“I tried to control the ball and I had contact from the defender and the ball went a little bit off my foot,” Balotelli told City TV five years later. “I thought in that half second maybe there would be a little room for Sergio.”
If Balotelli had stood tall, QPR most likely had seen through his latest piece of tireless defense. By being forced to his butt by the only assist of his Premier League career, he created opportunity and chaos.
Against his own goal, Derry had to beat a prone Balotelli, while Wright-Phillips’ route to defend himself was also compromised. With his centermate on the ground, Hill held his position, while Kompany toward the six-yard box dragged left-hander Taye Taiwo with him.
A pocket of space was opened. A patch of grass that Balotelli was able to locate from his sedentary position. As the limbs flailed around him and a tight defense dispersed, Aguero thought fast. The law of the porteno.
*********************
The Argentine tradition of tough and uncompromising neighborhood football goes hand in hand with the mystique and mythology that hides the country’s national sport.
A style of play based on skill and improvisation, La Nuestra, which translates as “our way”, was locked in the collective consciousness during the first half of the 20th century. The preeminent soccer magazine El Grafico, served to deepen this romantic bond, with representations of the kid, literally a boy or a hedgehog, whose rough and clever soccer technique combines intelligence and street skill and was something of an archetype. Typically they would haggle in the gambeta style, a description that implies close control, cunning, and deception of opponents.
The idea that people like Diego Maradona, Ariel Ortega, Lionel Messi, and all those other squat, explosive, and technically brilliant attackers from Argentina dipped into the yellowed pages of the El Grafico archive is wild, but the style is unquestionably embedded. Think about the number of goals players have produced: close control, small pauses, and fainting as the thighs make their way through the defenses.
As the walls approached the City’s title offering, Agüero proved to be a proud product of this lineage. When Balotelli began his battle with gravity, he skillfully checked his career behind and around Wright-Phillips to open a path to the penalty area.
Letting the pass roll, he formed to shoot, drawing Taiwo running, who left his Kompany lure too late to maintain control. Agüero didn’t actually touch Balotelli’s return pass until the position of his body persuaded an impetuous slide drill to push past with the outside of his right boot.
With Taiwo properly gambeta’d, a final stroke of fortune came.
*********************
“I touched him again and saw that he was close to the goal, so I said ‘I will shoot’. The worst thing was that he wanted to shoot hard through the goal and he went to the nearby post, I don’t know what happened,” Agüero told TyC Sports last month, the latest sentiment at least lined him up with all the souls inside Etihad Stadium that day.
“After seeing it again, I realized that if I had shot through the goal, a defender might have blocked it. I celebrated the goal and said to everyone, ‘I hit it so well!'”
Goal 23 of a personal Premier League tally that now reads 180, one of 127 with Agüero’s fierce right boot, understandably left an indelible impression on the suddenly defeated Hughes.
“Of all the games I’ve been involved in, that noise at that point when that goal came in is unlike anything I’ve heard before or since.”
“It was an incredible sound, a different sound for a football crowd. It was a mix of screaming and noise. It was an incredible moment.”
That racket has been played thousands of times around the world. A tightrope goal that altered the course of English football, which started with gifting the opposition with a 92-minute serve and ended thanks to a mistake after the main protagonist’s attacking partner fell.
It is the most famous goal of the Premier League, a moment as synonymous with Manchester as the cotton factories and the Treasury, and yet Argentine to the core.
[ad_2]
