Back in the golden age of the modernist novel the big two on the global stage, the real A-list were – for me, Clive – Marcel Proust and James Joyce. No disrespect to the Woolfs, the Faulkners. But we’re talking top, top, top luminous, highly internalised prose fiction. Proust and Joyce were the high point of a movement, subject of endless critical study, debates, hagiographies. Like Kevin Keegan and John Toshack with their famed on-field telepathy, there was in their written work a profound connection, a kind of shared cerebral cloud, what football journalists like to call “an instinctive understanding”.
And yet the funny thing about Proust and Joyce is that rather than spending hours poring over each other’s words, they claimed to have barely read a page and only ever met once (disastrously). Accounts of that meeting at a party in Paris describe the two doyens spending 10 minutes frostily comparing ailments before somehow getting stuck in a cab home together, the journey taken up by Proust repeatedly slamming the window shut only for Joyce to pointedly yank it open again.
Despite the fact they didn’t know or like or read each other they remain, however, unavoidably connected. Despite the lack of any obvious shared game time, assists provided, or available pass completion stats, literary theory lumps them in as part of a tissue of wider influence, of some deeper grammar of shared ideas.
On the face of it this hasn’t (do you think?) got very much to do with Manchester City and the loss of both Sergio Agüero and David Silva to injury over the international break. It is a huge blow not just for City’s immediate hopes but for the English season generally. Let’s face it, whichever team you happen to support, four years on Silva-Agüero remains one of the Premier League’s most beautiful friendships.
Silva has been there for all five of City’s new-era trophies, Agüero for four. During which time they have occupied essentially the same space on the pitch, performing more or less the same range of movements, with the same basic idea of how to go about producing those fine-point moments of attacking incision.
Still, though, perhaps the most interesting thing about Agüero and Silva is their slight obscurity as a pair. The normal thing here would be to produce a range of stats showing in the baldest terms exactly what City are going to miss from their two best attacking players. This is how English football has generally worked, with a tendency to see a series of partnerships, from big-man-small-man to one-to-get-it-and-one-to-give-it, to the great clunking hand of “first wave” stats analysis, with its assists and key passes, its footballing Numberwang. Except, not so much here.
This has been a story of shared influence rather than direct cause and effect. In the Premier League Silva has provided only 11 direct scoring passes for Agüero in four years. Four of these are bookended in two thrashings: Agüero’s first City hat-trick in 2011 and his most recent against Newcastle this month. Even in the run to that first Premier League title, when Agüero scored 13 goals in 13 wins from 18 games in all competitions, none of these were assisted or directly “made” by Silva.
There are some obvious conclusions here. First the “assist” can look like a pretty vague unit of football. Four years ago Lionel Messi scored 53 goals in one season, only eight of them “assisted” Xavi and Andrés Iniesta. But, well. You know. They may have had some kind of role there. Secondly players you might expect to influence each other directly under the old binary idea of more linear partnerships don’t appear to be playing along right now.
The real exception right now is Santi Cazorla’s apparent svengali-like hypnotic hold over Theo Walcott. Cazorla has assisted nine of Walcott’s 26 league goals since he arrived at Arsenal. Beyond that the only active duos in double figures are all City. Yaya Touré and Aguero have 10. Silva and Edin Dzeko, who has just 50 league goals overall, have 11. This is probably affected by the sheer churn of players. Part of the triumph of Silva, Aguero and Touré has been their basic refusal to go away.
There is, though, something else here, another strand in the increasingly obscure and refined relationship between football’s many variables and working parts. Seven assists in four years in between those hat-tricks!
This is very obviously a blip in the measurements, a failure to register in among the bluntly sifted data the basic potency of a partnership that isn’t quite a partnership but which is quite clearly still a partnership.
Silva is the key to all this for City, a player who at times looks like the only grown-up on the pitch, all shifting, glancing angles, equations being solved, options reviewed and discarded like some prescient little time-travelling sprite. His function in that central role is to enter a partnership with every player on his team, greasing the gears, rewarding each movement with a counter-movement, a prompt, a nudged pass.
Watching City at their best you get the feeling Silva’s partnership with Agüero operates at one remove, a kind of syndication managed by his delegated distribution arm: by Jesús Navas, Samir Nasri, or whoever else happens to be on the end his tactful little Sergio-facing prompts, each phase, each shift of angle a love letter down the line. Little wonder when both men play City tend to win; and Agüero tends to score.
The lack of high-quality replacement – sorry, Wilfried – suggests Agüero will be the real miss for Wednesday’s Champions League game against Sevilla.
Although there is perhaps a case their joint absence might help that supporting cast begin the process of refreshing City’s attacking range.
Silva will be 30 in January. Agüero has said he personally wants to stay. Either way it is likely the real wonder years, the meat of what has been one of the great fraternal Premier League short stories, is starting to get behind us now. For all its more diffuse range of influence, it has been a partnership to broaden the mind, or at least the argument, a most productive monosyllabic late-night taxi ride though Paris. Never mind the assist tables, the dog-eared notion of two-by-two. When Agüero and Silva play, City play and English football has been a more beautiful thing for it.
