There are Arsenal’s highly controlled, clockwork, almost Teutonic setpieces. And then there’s the free-flowing, mind-of-his-own Man City playmaker, Rayan Cherki.
Ahead of the big Premier League showdown against Arsenal, Man City coach Pep Guardiola, was trying to contain and channel the effervescence of his young French midfielder, who tends to do his own thing but is highly effective for the team.
Cherki had got Guardiola confessing that he was loosening some of his controlling strings ahead of the Chelsea game last week. “Rayan is a special, special player. He is a little bit of a free soul. I am a manager who likes control, we know this. So sometimes, on the touchline, it is so, so tough to watch. My heart… pff,” he was quoted as saying by Goal.com.
City have Haaland and they have a bunch of others who he has tried to fit into his patterns. But Cherki has left Guardiola reconsidering his own beliefs.
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“He gets the ball, he starts the tricks, and my instinct is to shout, ‘Rayan, please, play simple!’ But if I tell him against Chelsea, ‘Stop this,’ I destroy the player. I take away his incredible quality. What he did against Arsenal, against Liverpool… exceptional. Unbelievable,” he was quoted as saying by Goal.com.
Cherki is ambidextrous, and is known to use his left foot 56% while dribbling which turns into viral reels and right 44% that’s used for corner kicks. He creates electricity in the last 30 minutes with his slalom dribbles that run riot using his triple crochet hooks and chops as per goal.com. His rabona passes and feints are known to boggle defenders.
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His other eccentricities include wearing opposition players’ shirts while on the bench, according to goal.com. ‘Only Bruno Fernandes has more assists than him in the Premier League season, while Cherki has the highest number of goal creations in open play, with only one of his assists coming from a set-piece,’ goal.com wrote.
Product of the Lyon academy, he became the club’s youngest ever goalscorer at 16. But his coaches are often left with the ‘pff’ feeling because of his blazing cocksure confidence.
“So, I want to see it again. If he feels it, he does it. Go out, express yourself, have fun, and show the world how good you are,” Guardiola said. Arsenal are however a more robotic, mechanical unit than Chelsea, albeit winning despite their dull play.
Cherki’s Chelsea performance led to the impossible – Guardiola telling him he didn’t need to put in the defensive shift. “His mum and dad gave us a talent to play close to Haaland but sometimes he plays close to [Gianluigi] Donnarumma and that is useless,” Guardiola had said recently.
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“First half, he played close to me. Play close to [Erling] Haaland and the wingers and the attacking midfielders and use the talent that mum and dad gave to you. When he starts to do that, he will become an extraordinary player with his mindset and mentality. We’ll bring the ball to you. It’s not necessary to come down,” he said of the signing ahead of Florian Wirtz.
Former City defender Gael Clichy, who coached the player with France’s under-21 side as an assistant coach to Thierry Henry, had told goal.com back in September, “If we talk about the quality of the player, I haven’t seen anyone that good. That’s a big quote, but I do feel that if he can bring his off-the-ball game to a certain level, I think we could be talking about a player that can can reach Kevin De Bruyne’s numbers, because in tight spaces, in key areas of the pitch, he can create danger.”
Guardiola even admitted after a CL game that he should’ve started with Cherki.
“Now you can criticise me incredibly, for the selection, now I deserve it. It’s sometimes for the balance. We learned in the beginning that when we played Erling with Jeremy (Doku) or Cherki that we are incredibly unbalanced, we do not have the stability that teams in the Premier League have to have,” he explained the conundrum.
