It’s hard to work out whether Riyad Mahrez’s Manchester City player of the month award for December, which he claimed with over 80 per cent of the vote, is proof of his increasing popularity among the club’s die-hard fans or simply the latest demonstration of how much he is loved at home in Algeria.
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You could make a plausible argument for both, given how well the 30-year-old has been playing over the past 12 months, although it probably is that online army of Algerians who will cheer for any club Mahrez plays for and have boundless energy when it comes to telling the world how great he is.
And for the next few weeks they will get him all to themselves as he captains defending champions Algeria at the Africa Cup of Nations.
“Riyad Mahrez is a national icon in Algeria, he’s a star in the truest sense of the term,” says Walid Ziani, who runs the@DZfoot Twitter account that is dedicated to the north African country’s national team. “Going around the country, his posters are everywhere, there’s murals of him everywhere; and when Manchester City play most Algerians are tuning in, it’s almost like a national event.
“We haven’t had a player of his stature in about 30 or 40 years, since the golden generation of the 1980s. He’s the golden boy of Algerian football and I would say that at this point he is a symbol for Algerians in the same way that Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane are for their respective nations. He’s a massive icon in Algeria.”
Understandably, the time Salah and Mane spend with Egypt and Senegal respectively over the next month is likely to have more of an impact on Liverpool, given their importance to the side, than Mahrez’s adventure in Cameroon will on City.
But that is no slight on him.
City don’t miss anybody.
They don’t miss Kevin De Bruyne whenever he’s injured, and he has won the PFA’s player of the season award for the last two years running. They haven’t missed having a true left-back for about five years. They might even be better without a genuine striker.
That’s part of a wider debate about squad building but City are a machine and, due to Pep Guardiola’s management, players can come in and move out of the side without any noticeable drop-off in performances or results.
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Having said that, they might not want Mahrez to be unavailable for too long.
City share the goals around their team these days but across all four competitions in the calendar year of 2021 the Algerian scored more of them (21) and also registered more assists (13) than any of his Etihad team-mates.
Player | Goals | Assists |
|---|---|---|
21 | 13 | |
18 | 12 | |
17 | 9 | |
16 | 7 | |
15 | 11 | |
14 | 9 | |
12 | 11 | |
9 | 2 | |
5 | 11 |
And beyond that consistent flow of goal involvements, he looks right at home in the City team these days, part of that well-oiled machine, yet another player who knows exactly where he should be and what he should be doing.
There will have been plenty of non-Algerian votes for Mahrez recently but he has not always been the most popular player among City fans since his move from Leicester City in the summer of 2018, and it probably helps explain why he isn’t as revered in Manchester as Salah and Mane are on Merseyside, let alone in their home countries.
In his first year or so at City, Mahrez was the subject of the same kind of comments Jack Grealish now has to put up with: he was ‘shackled’ in Guardiola’s team, he didn’t fit their style, he wasn’t on the same wavelength as the others. Things like that.
There was a late missed penalty in a 0-0 draw at Anfield in the October of that debut season — the memory of which still lingers — when he took the ball off Gabriel Jesus; in the February, the Etihad Stadium crowd was noticeably grumpy whenever he lost the ball in a game against West Ham United and he was substituted 10 minutes into the second half that day (which is early for Guardiola).
In his second season, when he started to look more at home, it was still a common complaint that Mahrez held onto the ball for too long, that he too often took the wrong option and gave possession away cheaply.
The Athletic reported that team-mates had taken this up with him on two separate occasions. Mahrez didn’t like the article and denied it was true on Twitter, but it did also highlight that he was becoming a more important member of the team, creating chances alongside De Bruyne and Joao Cancelo at a time when City were in a bit of a creative slump.
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Guardiola and his staff changed things around a little over a year ago and City haven’t looked back. But rather than move towards a style that suited the things Mahrez had been doing since Leicester signed him from French second-division side Le Havre in January 2014, they went further the other way.
“It was more dynamic, more crosses: me on one side, Leroy (Sane) on the other side; two motorbikes, just constant zoom zoom zoom zoom,” Raheem Sterling said recently, describing how City are not as direct as they used to be, particularly out wide. “Now, it’s more left foot on the right wing, right foot on the left wing and it’s more patient, more keep-ball and not as dynamic, but both teams kept the ball really well and score goals.”
The idea that Mahrez is thriving in a more patient, less direct City team, given those earlier claims about his own direct style, is quite ironic. He has adapted and deserves credit for that, yet that only tells half the story.
When Guardiola explained the reasons for his side’s resurgence at the start of 2021, he talked about wingers going back to playing high and wide, and Sterling had been restored to his natural side of the pitch.
With the left-footed Phil Foden on the left, it looked like Mahrez, who has never really played on the left at all, might not fit into the new plans. And yet, within a few weeks, he had become undroppable as Guardiola had clearly established a group of players who needed to be kept fresh for City’s run to the Champions League final.
Mahrez was crucial in that run and it could be argued they wouldn’t have got to the final were it not for his cutting edge, given he buried a penalty at a crucial time against Borussia Dortmund in the quarter-final’s second leg and then scored three of City’s four goals in the semi-final win over Paris Saint-Germain.
And yet he was out of the team again at the start of this season.
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Jesus established himself on the right wing and Mahrez started two of the first 12 Premier League matches, sitting on the bench at Stamford Bridge, Anfield and Old Trafford — and not coming off it in the latter two.
City seemed to be moving on yet again and they certainly look thrilling when their wingers hug the touchline, allowing Bernardo Silva, Ilkay Gundogan and whoever plays as the striker to exploit the spaces in the middle.
But Mahrez can stay high and wide, too. He’s still dangerous when running at a full-back and cutting inside (aided by that wonderful first touch of his), but he knows how to hold his position and free up others to do the more destructive work when he has to — not that his scoring streak is over.
He scored five times in the six Champions League group games and was on a run of four in four consecutive league appearances before joining up with Algeria for AFCON.
His penalty at Arsenal on New Year’s Day may have even cemented him as City’s best taker of them, given he has scored eight in a row for club and country since that Anfield nightmare three and a half years ago.
More than any online vote, the real proof that Mahrez has won the City fans over will come when they have full confidence that their team will score from the spot. They’ve had a difficult couple of years on that front but if one player is going to fix that, it may as well be Mahrez.
Those early frustrations seem to be a thing of the past, and where he may have once overplayed, everything now seems efficient, barely a touch wasted.
Even on Tuesday, as Algeria struggled to a goalless draw with Sierra Leone in their opening group match, Mahrez played a selfless role, hitting those reverse passes in behind the defence and finding team-mates in good areas, just like he does in a City shirt.
He was one of the star men as Algeria won the previous AFCON in 2019 and he could do the same this time around.
Then he’ll come back to City and slot perfectly back into the machine.
(Top photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)
