Five minutes remained on the clock when the fourth official raised the digital substitution board. It flashed No 17. A wave of applause erupted in Craven Cottage, the home ground of Fulham, as Kevin de Bruyne, his crown of golden hair flapping in the West London breeze, glided onto the pitch. For the one last time in the sky blue shirt of Manchester City.
By then, there was no task left for him to perform on the day. Manchester City had extracted a 2-0 lead and secured a spot in next season’s Champions League. There was no rolling the clock, a farewell trick or a tribute. Perhaps, it was the finest tribute his colleagues could offer him. To simply enjoy the last five minutes of his glorious career, soak in the light of his deeds. There was nearly a throwback moment when he almost slid a pass from the instep of his right boot and found Phil Foden but for a defender’s flailing leg. De Bruyne smiled wryly. It was not quite his evening. But there were hundreds of others, afternoons, evenings and nights, he could call his own.
The history of Manchester City’s greatest era is the biography of two great men. Pep Guardiola and de Bruyne. The creator and the conduit. The soul and the heart. When de Bruyne hit the high notes, he was a rhapsody, strumming the perfect beat with his feet. He was no routine passer who performed to practised tunes. But mastered the toughest metre in football orchestra—to see the pass that no one sees. He, like the great pass-metronome Xavi, could also see the pass no one else imagined, or after its execution, no one else believed.
The responses of crestfallen defenders were not marvelling at a piece of unstoppable genius, but a sense of shock as to how the space existed, sort of a phantom space. It was right there, right here, yet no one saw. Often, the pass was a gentle roll along the ground, the ball not bending and bursting but whistling through a straight line, through a cavalcade of frozen impulses.
The work of a genius operating on the outer reaches of imagination, intelligence and a perception of space and time. He could conjure the magical too, the curlers and benders that wickedly hooped around the corners, the supersonic thunderbolts from the distance, the pace not diluting the precision. He created, scored, disrupted and defended, making him one of the most difficult players to classify in the conventional sense. He was a midfielder. Or was he? He was a right-sided forward, but was he? Was he an 8 or 10? He wore No 17, a figure that breaks conventional number-role correlation.