Three goals against 10-man Bayern Munich and suddenly Sergio Agüero is being hailed as the new Diego Maradona or being given a leg up to the pedestal of contemporary legends occupied for so long by just Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Is Manchester City’s striker really that good? As a striker, he quite possibly is, as his hat-trick against Bayern demonstrated. For while it was true that the Germans had nothing riding on the result, and had gone down to 10 men before half time, the context of the game was everything. City were being outplayed. They needed to win, or felt they needed to win, and Agüero was the player, the only player, who made that possible.
He had three chances on the night, and took them all ruthlessly. The first one might have been a penalty, but Agüero’s pace, strength and eye for a chance had put him into a position to score, which was why Mehdi Benatia was correctly shown a red card for bringing him down. By the end, the whole ground was in no doubt that he would score when the final chance came his way. The bigger the occasion, the more crucial the result, the more the game seems to be slipping inexorably away without some sort of superhuman intervention, the more likely it appears that Agüero will step up to provide it.
“This year Sergio has been unbelievable,” his team-mate Samir Nasri said. “He was the same last year but then he got his injury. This year he is fitter.
“When he is one-on-one with the goalkeeper you don’t see him miss the target. Ronaldo may be on another planet, but for me Sergio is up there with Messi and [Luis] Suárez. He always delivers in a difficult moment. I don’t think I need to speak about his performances because the stats speak for themselves. He’s a great player. When he’s on his day he’s unstoppable, and we needed him to be that against Bayern.”
The stats also indicate that Agüero might be City’s most valuable player. Yaya Touré is generally considered the heartbeat of the team but there appears to be a direct correlation between Agüero scoring and City succeeding. Agüero has scored five of City’s seven Champions League goals this season and 17, almost half, of their 38 in all competitions.
Furthermore, every time Agüero has scored in a game this season City have either won (7) or drawn (4). Of the seven games when Agüero has played but failed to score, City have lost five, won one and drawn the other.
Of the three strikers on duty at the Etihad this season Agüero has played more games and more minutes than Edin Dzeko or Stevan Jovetic and therefore scored more goals, though his total of 17 so far is more than the other two put together.
Agüero has produced more shots on target (38) than either Dzeko (8) or Jovetic (9), and on average he has scored a goal every 74.8 minutes, which compares very favourably with Dzeko’s 243.8 and Jovetic’s 222.3. Just over 30 per cent of Agüero’s shots end up in the back of the net, whereas the other two can only boast 14.8 per cent and 12.5 per cent, although you do not really need Opta statistics to tell you that the Argentine is lethal in front of goal.
Some of Agüero’s shots are speculative, he misses from time to time like any other human, but if you need a goal to save your life and he only has the goalkeeper to beat then there cannot be many surer bets in world football.
It was Manuel Pellegrini who first suggested that his player had the potential this season to establish himself alongside Messi and Ronaldo at the pinnacle of world football, though the City manager appeared to be backtracking slightly when he said after the Bayern game that Agüero might simply be the best striker in the world. There is a subtle difference.
Ronaldo and Messi are both players who can not only make goals, they can alter the course of a game by doing things other than scoring goals.
Ronaldo can make lightning charges from the half way line, for example, occupying the larger part of a defence to leave room for someone else to score. He can also test defences with shots on goal from set pieces, often leading to a tap-in goal for a team-mate after a half-save or a block on the line. In addition to his own reliable finishing, Messi can contribute the mazy dribbles that take out defenders, the unexpected pass into space or the route into the area that did not occur to anyone else.
Agüero is not quite such a complete player, his forte is scoring goals, but as a pure striker there are few better. His main competition in England at the moment might be Diego Costa, in Europe Luis Suárez, although the latter is really out on his own as an individual, both a deadly finisher, clever schemer and brilliant improviser.
But neither Costa nor Suárez is as physically strong as Agüero, as athletically muscular, as hard to knock off the ball. Unstoppable is exactly the right word, for though it is no secret what Agüero will try to do to defences, preventing him doing it can be near to impossible. He definitely deserves to be rated in the company of Costa and Suárez, but catching up with Messi and Ronaldo might take a little more time.
Not least because both of those players (and indeed the other two) take Champions League football and vying for domestic honours for granted. Manchester City are not quite at that stage yet. They are improving, thanks in no small part to Agüero, but if it is true that the biggest games bring out the very best in the biggest players, City will not figure in as many of them unless the rest of the squad can find a way to match their leading scorer’s standard.
That can be the only explanation for Agüero’s absence from the 40-man shortlist Uefa have just announced for team of the year. There are nowhere near 40 better players than Agüero in Europe, and there might not be any deadlier strikers.
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