Kevin De Bruyne is Man City’s greatest ever player, but his decline has been startling quick, writes OLIVER HOLT

I would rather celebrate Kevin De Bruyne than mourn him. In a sport that often feels so complicated and torn off the pitch, he has always represented the timeless beauty of football on it.

There are a lot of players I have loved watching over the past 10 years in the Premier League but no one more than him.

I have always loved his vision most of all. The passes he could curl around a startled, helpless defence into the path of an onrushing Sergio Aguero or Gabriel Jesus or Erling Haaland, or any other Manchester City striker lucky enough to have him loading their bullets, were pieces of art.

The passes he threaded through the heart of defences, when he had spotted a run that no one else could have seen and played a ball that no one else could have played, were breathtaking moments of theatre, too.

Then there were his goals. His goals were absurd. He is up there with Steven Gerrard as the sweetest striker of the ball I’ve seen in the English game. So many of his drives, off either foot, were still rising when they smashed into the net.

He has made helpless bystanders of the best goalkeepers of his generation. I treated myself to another look at one of his highlight reels on Monday. There’s the one where he cuts outside on to his left foot and drills a classic drive high past Leicester City’s Kasper Schmeichel.

He was the driving force in perhaps the greatest side in the history of the Premier League

De Bruyne has led City to great heights with his penetrative runs and incisive defence-splitting passes

There’s the laser-guided missile he launches from 30 yards that flies past Swansea City’s Lukasz Fabianski. ‘That’s a world-class strike from a world-class player,’ Gary Neville says on the Sky Sports commentary. That highlights reel goes on and on and on.

When the debate has arisen, I had always put forward Colin Bell as City’s greatest ever player, partly because he’s preserved in my memory as part of the excitement of the first exposure to watching football live as a kid. I don’t agree with those who choose Sergio Aguero over him, for instance.

But I have no hesitation now in saying De Bruyne is the greatest ever to pull on the sky blue shirt. David Silva was a genius, too, but De Bruyne was a leader in the team that won the Champions League for the first time in City’s history in 2023. He was the best player in the City team that became the first side in the history of top-flight English football to win the league title four years in succession and he was beautiful to watch along the way.

It is a digression but the argument over who is Liverpool’s greatest ever is harder to call. Mo Salah is getting plenty of votes in that direction at the moment and he is an incredible player and it is a scandal he has never won the Ballon d’Or but I would still have Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Gerrard ahead of him.

If Salah stays and wins more Champions Leagues, maybe that will change. Salah still seems as if he has a lot left to give and a lot more to achieve. I don’t think that applies to De Bruyne. Many noticed, with a slight jolt, earlier this season, that Pep Guardiola had openly started to talk about De Bruyne’s prime in the past tense and he was absolutely right.

Perhaps it is the accumulation of injuries he has suffered, perhaps it is the accumulation of all the medals he has won and the realisation he has no lands left to conquer, perhaps it is just that he is 33 and counting, but De Bruyne’s decline this season has been startlingly quick. He was left out of the starting line-up for the second leg of their Champions League tie with Real Madrid last week and even when City were being humbled, Guardiola did not turn to him. On Sunday, he started his first league game for a month.

It did not go well. He looked as if he was playing at a different pace to everyone else, certainly everyone on the Liverpool team, and not in a good way. He looked like a player out of time. ‘I love watching the brutality of top-level sport,’ Roy Keane said after the match. Sport waits for no one, not even someone as good as De Bruyne.

The most obvious symbol of his decline came right on the brink of half-time when he took a couple of tentative steps forward on the edge of the Liverpool box and swung back that shotgun of a left foot.

City manager Pep Guardiola openly started to talk about De Bruyne’s prime in the past tense

My seat in the press box was in a direct line with the ball’s trajectory. This time, instead of bursting the net, it sliced away wildly, high and wide towards the corner flag, where the Liverpool fans welcomed it with glee.

De Bruyne turned away sadly and put his finger to his cheek, as if he were puzzled by what he had just done, as if he could not quite grasp that his body would no longer obey his mind.

I almost wish I hadn’t seen it but then I was there for so many of the beautiful things he did, too, and I wouldn’t have missed them for the world.

The new villain of English football?  

Sir Jim Ratcliffe is fast turning into a rip-roaring good old-fashioned villain of English football.

This is a ‘businessman’ who hands £200million to washed-up, already discredited Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag in the summer so he can buy another gang of duds and then sacks some of the little people at Old Trafford and lets it be known, this week, that he’s closing the staff canteen.

One of his many executive lackeys might want to summon up the courage to point out that United aren’t losing money because Dylan from marketing has a small portion of lasagne for his lunch on Wednesdays.

They’re losing money because of the incompetence that appears to run right through the organisation, the latest manifestation of which was the huge £4m pay-off doled out to Dan Ashworth after he was sacked five months into his job as sporting director. You can get an awful lot of paninis for £4m. Maybe the canteen caper is another of Sir Dave Brailsford’s brilliant ideas of a marginal gain.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe is fast turning into a rip-roaring good old-fashioned villain of English football

The Hammerschlagen episode

I didn’t know there were any left, but on Saturday, I discovered another sport I’m bad at. I was at a beautiful wedding in the Cotswolds late in the evening when I saw a group of guests standing round a wooden log, taking turns to hammer nails into it.

Hammerschlagen is a German game where the goal is to drive the nail flush with the surface of the wood. Someone saw me coming a mile off and I was prevailed upon to play. 

Given that I was (relatively) sober and several of my younger opponents carried the general comportment of revellers who might be seeing double, I was quietly confident. 

Five or six wayward swings of my hammer later, my nail was the final one still protruding and I was off to the bar to complete my forfeit of buying a round of a dozen queasy-looking shots of Baby Guinness. I’m not quite sure what a Baby Guinness is, by the way, but it isn’t Guinness.