Premier League Hangover: Why Is Sergio Aguero so Criminally Underappreciated?

"I learned to play with the sun: if there is sun, there are shadows. Often playing with my back to the net, when I touch the ball the first thing to do is look for the shadow of my marker, so I can get around from the other side."

For a man it's difficult to recall having ever heard speak, Sergio Aguero has a nice way with words, as relayed by Francesco Paolo Giordano in his superb essay Argentine Miracle.

Play Aguero's thoughts back in your head while watching his goal against Liverpool at the Etihad Stadium back in February 2013, and it all makes sense.

With his back to goal, Aguero knows intuitively when to round Pepe Reina as the Liverpool goalkeeper charges off his line. It's as though he's felt in the shadows for him coming. What comes after, a looped finish from the most outrageous of angles, should have gone back on the Liverpool team coach and dropped off at the Tate.

Maybe it's because he plays in the shadows we have become blase to his brilliance. For what explanation could there be for the player with the best goals-per-minute ratio in Premier League history having one of the worst column-inches-per-goal quotients, other than the sun having got in the eyes of those charged with making sense of what they have seen each weekend.

Aguero's match-winning brace against Burnley on Saturday was headline news for about as long as it took Liverpool to supplant Manchester City at the Premier League summit with a win against Sunderland just a few hours later. By the time Chelsea had become the third league leaders of the day, Aguero's contribution to proceedings was no more than a footnote. 

It merited not a single mention on Match of the Day, which is quite the snub given it is a highlights show that prides itself on pointing out the bleeding obvious.

"In a star studded Manchester City side I think he goes unnoticed at times," said Danny Murphy of Fernandinho. He could have been talking about Aguero.

Football's portal to salient facts in a sea of asinine opinion, Opta, was not so complacent. For 90 minutes, it was as though Aguero had staged a coup and was using their Twitter feed to broadcast propaganda declaring his genius live from Turf Moor.

All of which, were it true, would have been strangely fitting on the day after the passing of Fidel Castro, given upon his arrival in Manchester in 2011, Aguero, in a wholly uncharacteristic bold claim, had likened himself to Che Guevara, per World Soccer's Jamie Rainbow. He has rarely spoken since.

Match of the Day is not alone in taking Aguero for granted. It’s a tired cliche perhaps, yet there's a sense English football will only realise what it had when he's gone.

At 5'8", he looks like he should be a No. 10. Earlier in his career, at Independiente—where he made his debut at 15 years, one month and three days old, breaking Diego Maradona's record to become the youngest debutant in Argentine top-flight history—he would often play off a main striker. When he joined Atletico Madrid, he would play the same role again, first in tandem with Fernando Torres and then Diego Forlan.

At both clubs, his goalscoring was exemplary. In Argentina, his record at Independiente read 23 goals in 54 league games; in Spain, he boasted 75 in 175 for Atletico.

His role at Manchester City has always been more about playing between the whites of the posts. It's hard to think of a player who takes possession in a crowded penalty area so comfortably. The tighter the situation, the more he likes it. There's certainly no one better in England. He could dribble a football in an under-the-stairs cupboard that houses a vacuum cleaner and not touch the walls. 

With a bow-legged gait, low centre of gravity, legs like a bison, the acceleration of a gazelle and an arse like a Kardashian, Aguero has often been compared to Brazil legend Romario.

"Sergio is a photocopy of Romario, they are the same player," said Roberto Mancini, the manager who brought him to England from Atletico, per the Daily Telegraph. 

His title-winning effort against Queens Park Rangers in the final seconds of the 2011/12 season—surely the most iconic Premier League goal of them all, to the chagrin of previous incumbents Eric Cantona, Dennis Bergkamp, Tony Yeboah and David Beckham—could have been scored by vintage Romario circa 1993-95.

There's something fitting about how all the goals mentioned are synonymous with the individual, except Aguero's, which is all about Manchester City winning the Premier League for the first time. Not that the others weren't team players, they were, but there is something unique about Aguero's talent being married with a seemingly complete absence of ego.

Everton boss Ronald Koeman, who played with Romario in those two years at Barcelona, drew the same conclusion as Mancini upon facing Aguero when manager of Southampton.

"The best player to compare to Aguero is Romario," Koeman said, per the Manchester Evening News' Samuel Luckhurst. "I played with him. Sometimes you think he's sleeping then in one split second he's scoring. It's a big quality. He's always fast, always on the line of sight."

Current Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola is not a fan of players sleeping on the pitch, even if they are pretending—like a lion trying to draw a hippo out of the water. Aguero was dropped for key games against Barcelona and Everton earlier this season, with his new manager having called for him to do more work off the ball and improve his linkup play with the rest of the team.

Given Guardiola probably gets frustrated with his can opener because it can't tell him the time, it's fair to say he can be a little demanding.

"

Guardiola's reaction to Sergio Aguero's two goals against Burnley. #mcfc pic.twitter.com/oTumKsBp0i

— Inside MCFC (@inside_mcfc) November 26, 2016"

Still, he made Aguero's compatriot and best friend Lionel Messi a better player, so there should be a willingness to make the relationship work on both sides.  

A tedious obsession with debating how many "world-class" players are currently ensconced in the Premier League, in relation to other foreign lands, is made even odder by a reluctance to fully embrace one of the few bona fide talents even Manchester United supporters wouldn't bother disputing belongs in said list.

It's this preoccupation with what's new, with who might be creeping around the corner to announce themselves as football's latest star—when allied with a mawkish rubber-neck fascination with those on the decline—that can sometimes mean, in a perverse way, the period in between when a player is established and routinely doing their job well is arguably the least interesting part of the three major stages most pass through in their careers.

That a couple of tap-ins against Burnley did not have the Ballon d'Or hotline ringing off the hook is unlikely to tempt Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the investigative journalists who broke Watergate, into getting the old team back together. However, that Aguero has never been nominated for the PFA Player of the Year, nor even made the Team of the Year, is no less of a scandal than what happened in Washington. 

Few would disagree that Aguero is one of the Premier League's leading lights. It is less he is underrated than underappreciated. There's a definite difference between the two.

Like a book picked off the Booker Prize list that goes unfinished as understanding it is enough, or a "well made" (often a euphemism for boring) film that has you checking your watch every 10 minutes in between bouts of earnest nodding, Aguero seems to be more admired than loved. For the neutral, that is.

Manchester City supporters, on the other hand, tend to look at anyone disputing Aguero's prodigious talent as Christopher Columbus probably did those who wanted him locked up for telling them the world was round.

Since making one of the finest debuts in English football history, against Swansea City on August 15, 2011, when he scored twice and laid one on a plate for David Silva in a 31-minute cameo off the substitutes' bench, Aguero has rarely been anything less than spellbinding.

To pull out a binder of statistics in the middle of an opinion piece purporting to illuminate a player's poetry may seem pragmatic to the point of folly; however, to sit on them would be akin to trying to start a fire with two wet twigs when in possession of a flamethrower. 

In April last year, Aguero reached the milestone of 100 Premier League goals, credited as being the fastest player to do so behind Alan Shearer. He got there in just 129 starts, 147 appearances in total, scoring a goal on average every 107.55 minutes, per ESPN FC's Jonathan Smith.

None of his rivals can match his goals-per-minute rate, not even Shearer. The now-BBC pundit reached 100 Premier League goals in 124 games, while a phenomenal 260 in total understandably saw his goals-per-minute ratio eventually drop off to one every 146.86 minutes.

Will Aguero be remembered with anything like the same reverence as Shearer or Thierry Henry or Ruud van Nistelrooy, all of whom he outscored en route to his century stand? In a more contemporary comparison, will he be regarded to have been in the same class as someone like Luis Suarez?

Manchester City could not have won either of their titles without Aguero. Liverpool didn't win any with Suarez.

The five goals he scored against Newcastle United last season is the joint-highest in a single Premier League match and certainly came during the shortest period at a remarkable 23 minutes and 34 seconds. No South American has ever scored more in English football, not even Jo.

He has Eric Brook's Manchester City club record of 177 goals in all competitions—set between 1928 and 1939—firmly in his sights, too. Aguero is on 152 and counting.

Aguero scored 24 Premier League goals last season; the same number as Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy. Harry Kane nabbed a solitary goal more to pip both players to the Golden Boot. Aguero needed 2,375 minutes to net his haul, bettering Kane (3,370) and Vardy (3,140), both of whom were nominated for the PFA Player of the Year and named in the Premier League Team of the Year.

Aguero did not make the cut in either category. 

There is something puzzling about his never having been recognised by his fellow professionals. In his five full seasons in English football to date, Aguero has won two Premier League titles, the League Cup twice and has scored more than 20 league goals (23 in 2011/12, 26 in 2014/5 and 24 in 2015/16) on three occasions. He won the Golden Boot for the 2014/15 season, outscoring Kane by five goals and Costa six. You'd never guess which two of the three were named in the Team of the Year. 

Just like the Academy finally giving an Oscar to Martin Scorsese in 2007 for The Departed, having overlooked him for Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Taxi Driver, expect the PFA to decorate Aguero in the season he leaves City in January, to join first love Independiente, having decided his legs aren't quite what they once were.

Aguero's pair of goals at the weekend have invariably been described as scruffy, as if those delivered wearing a suit are somehow worth more. They took his tally of Premier League goals for the season to 10, drawing him level with Chelsea's born-again striker Diego Costa.

It has taken Aguero 227 minutes fewer than Costa to reach double figures, which equates to around two-and-a-half matches. In all competitions this term, Aguero has scored 16 goals in 18 appearances for City.

The Bible dedicates fewer pages to Jesus' Second Coming than has been afforded to Costa's at Chelsea this season. It's easy to do. Costa is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of being a fascinating figure to write about. It's a bit like teachers who dedicate more of their time congratulating kids who are misbehaving a little less than usual than championing those who excel quietly.

Or as the poet W.H. Auden put it: "There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act."

Aguero has no act. His behaviour is never tiresome.

Maybe with players who let football do their talking, other people stop feeling it necessary to do it for them.

When Aguero first moved to England, the Spanish sports writer Fernando Spannaus (h/t the Daily Mirror), spoke of how during his time at Atletico Madrid he had no interest in speaking to the press and would answer questions in monosyllabic sentences: "He never opened up. He just wanted to play computers."

Players insulating themselves against feeling exposed when talking to the press, by wearing alternate layers of insouciance and indifference, can make it feel like trying to peel an onion wearing boxing gloves. If in attempting to understand what makes a player tick you conclude Call of Duty, it can make for pretty dry copy.

When someone like Eden Hazard would choose "Why Eden Hazard can match the level of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo" as his specialist subject on Mastermind, and offer quotes to match his performances, it shouldn't come as a surprise when he's the player most readily proffered as the Premier League's closest thing to La Liga pair.

Ruud Gullit, in his book How to Watch Football, argues it would be wrong in any case to try to elevate Aguero's standing to that of either football's demigods: "At Manchester City, Sergio Aguero is the closest the club has to a Messi or a Ronaldo. But whereas Messi and Ronaldo can do it alone, Aguero needs support and assistance."

In the same vein, it must amuse/anger those of a blue persuasion in Manchester to watch the English press dedicate tenfold the amount of space to writing about the goals Wayne Rooney isn't scoring ahead of the ones Aguero routinely does.

As the old industry saying goes, if it bleeds, it leads.

Which is a shame, as Aguero's backstory is at least as fascinating as Rooney's. The Croxteth area of Liverpool where the latter grew up may not attract much tourism, but it's nothing like Los Eucaliptos, a huge urban sprawl to the south of Buenos Aires, which carries the foreboding moniker "villa miseria."

Born to a poor family, Aguero and his six siblings were raised amid poverty and a high crime rate, with the City man having told reporters in the past football was literally his saviour­—most of his childhood friends are now in jail.

Going to sleep hungry was not unusual for Aguero, per the Mirror: "Sometimes we didn't have enough (food), I remember, and we had boiled mate (herbal tea) with bread. ... There were days when my father didn't have money for food, and we slept hoping the next day something could be got from work."

If Zlatan Ibrahimovich had said something similar, Manchester United's commercial team would have banged out a mate kettle, embossed with the club's logo, before the journalist had finished his transcription. Give it a week and Jamie Oliver would have been marching around council estates wrestling cans of Coke out of the hands of kids before forcing them to neck mate—with a dash of truffle oil.

Aguero's father, an excellent amateur player in his own right, always ensured his son had his own ball—a rarity in villa miseria, such was his determination to keep him away from drugs and gang crime. Both were highly prevalent in the area. It was on the same streets Aguero learned the game.

There were things lurking in the shadows far more menacing than any Premier League defender.

He is as much a street footballer as one-time father in-law Maradona. We should similarly revere Aguero as the Italians did Maradona when Argentina loaned him to Napoli and Serie A between 1984 and 1991.

After all, can any of us say with any real conviction whether Maradona could have done it on a cold Saturday lunchtime in Burnley?

When Aguero decides the time is right, Independiente's gain will be English football's loss, not just Manchester City's. There's no doubt about that, even if it seems not everybody knows it quite yet.

We'll miss Kun when he's gone.
    

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