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This iconic piece of commentary is how we all remember it – the moment that signaled the rise of a new power in English football, the defining moment that ushered in a new era where suddenly the biggest club in Manchester was no longer clad in red.
It was fitting that the man whose goals propelled Manchester City to their first Premier League Crown, whose ruthless cutting-edge finishing made the difference in all their big games; the man who is arguably the biggest superstar in a new-age galaxy of superstars; is immortalized in that exclamation of sheer wonder that proves the foremost memory of that moment – “Agüeeeeeerrrooooooooooooo!!!”
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Growing up in a Villa Miseria (exactly as depressing as it sounds – the two words translate to Village and Misery) where most lives get stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty, crime and sheer violence, few would have predicted such a moment would ever come to transpire.
It’s almost a cliché this, the rise of the poor little kid to football superstardom. Sergio Leonel Agüero Del Castillo’s story ticks all the right boxes– grew up in a large family with both parents doing all they could to make ends meet, sometimes had to make do with boiled mate (twigs and leaves) & bread for lunch and dinner simply because they didn’t have enough and had friends who have almost all ended up on the wrong-side of the law.
Clichéd it might be, but that takes nothing away from just how epic a tale it is.
Football, as it has been in so many lives, was the saviour. As Agüero put it – “Football surrounds you in Argentina. I always had the ball at my feet. At any moment of the day we’d be playing, in the sun or after dark. I’d spend hours and hours out there, sometimes even coming home late. Time was never a factor.”
He first started kicking it around on the dirty football pitch that sat in the middle of the Villa square, playing with the local kids (because no one from outside would dare come in) and soon caught the attention of the youth coaches at Independiente. Since then, his rise was meteoric.
He made his professional debut at the age of 15 years, 1 month and 3 days; in the process becoming the youngest player ever to play in an Argentinian top flight game – taking that particular record from a certain Diego Armando Maradona.
464 games, 239 goals and 89 assists later – going from Independiente to Manchester City, via a spectacular stop-over at Atlético Madrid – Agüero has grown from being a kid with great potential to being thought of as the best striker in the world.
And he has overcome a lot, from homesickness to an unhealthy addiction to fast food and a love for clubbing; obstacles that have been the bane for so many of South America’s great talents.
An all-action, all-round attacking footballer, Agüero’s success stems principally from his near-peerless footballing abilities. He is capable equally of playing up front on his own as well as just off a target man – capable of creating goals out of thin air just as much as finishing them with clinical efficiency.
It’s the unorthodoxy of it all that makes him so special – you expect a footballer of his physical stature to be a goal poacher, and he is that; but you don’t really expect him to be able to shrug off hurly-burly center-halves with quite such insouciant ease.
He isn’t your traditional fox-in-the-box either, capable of shooting powerfully off either foot from distance and (most noticeably when he played alongside Diego Forlán at Atlético) dropping deep to play a creator’s role.
Short of stature and bow legged, he walks around with the ungainly gait of a duck on land but with the ball at his feet he is an aesthetic marvel.
His feet whir across the pitch at a phenomenal speed, the ball sticking to him as if it was but a natural extension of his feet; his low center of gravity combining with deceptive, immense, strength making it almost impossible for defenders to knock him off the ball.
If you were a defender in the English League, there is no sight more terrifying. Off the ball, his gait hides lightning fast reflexes and a wonderful footballing mind that has an ingrained high-level game intelligence that opens up and finds space where there seemingly is none.
Footballing skill and physical attributes aren’t the say-all and end-all of it though. It’s the intangible, the immeasurable qualities that truly separate the boys from the men; and Agüero has oodles of it – the strength of character, the willingness and desire to pick himself up and keep running all day long and that tiger-ish aversion to being dispossessed and beaten.
He is the most important player for City – when Agüero scores, the team generally end up winning. And he scores a lot for them! Last season he was the leading scorer in England, and no one has ever had a better goal-per-mins played ratio (at least two years of playing) in the English Premier League than the Argentinian superstar.
The striker is also one of Argentina’s most important players and they look to him to be their primary source of goals as the combination of threats he offers are not offered by many in the game.
He is – without a shadow of a doubt – the most dangerous attacker in the English game, and at just 27 years old, what’s tantalising (or scary, your point of view really) is that the best may just be yet to come.
