A fine young right back, it would be little surprise to hear Brentford were fending off plenty of suitors for Michael Kayode in the summer. His true breakout season in the Premier League has attracted plenty of admirers – and not just for those bullet long throws.
He has all the attributes required to excel at the highest level in its current form and many a left winger has been left neutered by the Italian in recent months. Plenty more will encounter similar issues down the line.
But Kayode met his match on Saturday evening. More than met his match. A man Arne Slot labelled unstoppable earlier in the year. A man Trent Alexander-Arnold was telling team mates how tough it is to get close to.
Jeremy Doku said recently that if he started scoring goals then his belief is such that he ought to be in the conversation among the best wide players in the world. What he meant was scoring the easy goals, the old Raheem Sterling tap ins. Not this collection of wonder strikes, as Keith Andrews described the goal to open Manchester City’s victory up over Brentford.
He scored two very similar at Everton last Monday and he is now the player carrying City’s threat in their pursuit of the title. For long periods at the Etihad Stadium, it was Doku and 10 others. Everything went through him, every midfielder immediately looking left to locate him on gathering possession.
And it has been like that for a few weeks now. Kayode gave as good as he got but there is no stopping somebody like Doku in this sort of mood. Jinking right and left, that burst of pace over five yards and strength against a marker. These are very good signs for City moving forward.
Jeremy Doku scores a now trademark opening goal for Man City, curling it in from distance
Doku has become City’s go-to man as they continue to hang on to Arsenal’s coat-tails
‘He’s always had this ability on the ball, to drop the [opposition deeper] and the dribbles,’ Pep Guardiola said. ‘He was missing the last pass but this season he made a step forward that players must do to be better. His soul now is so calm.
‘You need to make actions like that to win games. It’s not enough to make crosses for others. If you want to become a better player, you have to win games for yourself. He’s made an incredible step up in the sense of [thinking] “I’m Jeremy Doku, I’m going to win games” and the greatest players always have that mentality.’
That is exactly the attitude that radiates from him these days. Doku has zeroed in on improving his end product, specifically his finishing, this season and team mates have noticed in training. The results have been self-evident in public over the past month, the Belgian also dragging them back into the FA Cup semi-final against Southampton.
He does recognise that most opponents attempt to double up on him, although Brentford left Kayode to handle City’s No 11 all by himself. It wasn’t all one way but Doku definitely had the upper hand. Even before his opening goal, he’d fashioned two presentable chances for Erling Haaland.
‘I think you can over-cover him,’ Andrews said. ‘You can put two players on him but with the nature of City, the level of talent that they have, if you do that there’s always going to be room for someone else to exploit that.’
Doku is at ease with creating space for others but with Guardiola’s words ringing in his ears, this demand from the manager that he insists on becoming the main character, he has made an obvious improvement.
‘If I have those goals then I believe that I can get there [best in the world] for sure, 100 per cent,’ he said.
By “those” goals, he meant the easy ones. The back post runs. Doku was a striker as a child so would like to think he has those instincts, and he’s studied Sterling’s career under Guardiola.
‘When I look at my goals, all the goals this season, I don’t see one tap-in,’ he said. ‘And when I look at Sterling, all the tap-ins that he scored, at least five, six, seven a season.
‘When I look at my goals, it’s all top goals, don’t get me wrong, but I want to score also those goals where I just tap-in, second post, run in and tap-in, and it just adds more goals to my account. That’s really the thing that I need to work on.’
That intuition is the next thing to perfect. Doku has admitted to disorientating himself on the pitch sometimes, unaware of the precise runs required to bag those simple goals. If he corrects these bits, that tally of eight for City this season could easily be doubled. And then the 23-year-old’s closer to the realm he dreams of.
