With Manchester City top of the table and in excellent form, praise for the players has not been in short supply.
Everyone at the club appears to be back at their best at the moment, with Pep Guardiola having found a way to reinvigorate a side that looked tired and slightly listless not long ago.
The re-emergence of several players has been key to their recent run of results, but if you had to pick one player who has impressed the most, it would be Ilkay Gundogan.
The player has significantly stepped things up since the middle of December, becoming a goal-scoring and creating midfielder in a move that very few would have predicted.
It’s seen the Manchester City man earning widespread praise, and that has spread to his native Germany, where his displays have now started to catch the eye.
Frankfurter Rundschau pick up that today and say the midfielder is ‘standing up’ for Manchester City and has hit ‘the zenith of his creative powers’.
They look back to mid-January when Kevin de Bruyne was ruled out and, at the time, nobody was arguing with Pep Guardiola when he said the Belgian was irreplaceable.
However, the Spanish boss’ decision to push Gundogan a little further forward has reaped massive rewards, with his two goals in City’s 4-1 win over Liverpool on Sunday his eighth and ninth of the season.
The ‘not quite young man’ does this job ‘excellently’ say FR, who say Gundogan’s willingness to submit, dust himself off, fit ‘reliably’ into the team and do the defensive work has helped him to hit his peak.
With all the talent available in Manchester City’s squad that is an ‘astonishing’ feat, particularly given the hurdles Gundogan has had to overcome.
In the past, he’s suffered a compression of the spine, a dislocated knee cap and a ruptured cruciate ligaments injury that cost him two years of his career and a place in the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Euros.
Indeed, his international career appeared to be at an end during the last World Cup, but instead, he has ‘put it away’ – like he put away a bout of Coronavirus in the summer and now he’s back at his best.
At Manchester City, he is the player who has ‘implemented’ Guardiola’s style better and with more ‘conviction’ than anyone else and now he’s added a goal-scoring instinct to his game to boot.
This is all a major plus, with FR very much presenting the piece as a case for Gundogan to finally find a place under Joachim Löw for Germany.
That is something he needs to work on, but the sentiment is very much that if he continues to shine as he has, the German boss will have no choice but to find a way to incorporate him into his plans.
