Wilfried Bony a dedicated, heavyweight signing for Manchester City

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/jan/14/wilfried-bony-signing-manchester-city-swansea

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Wilfried Bony’s numbers make for fascinating reading. Standing less than 6ft tall, Bony tips the scales at 91kg, which would make him a heavyweight in the world of boxing. He is the multilingual striker who played as a centre-half until the age of 14. Most significantly for Manchester City, who have parted with £25m to sign the Ivorian, Bony is ranked as the fifth-highest goalscorer across the top six leagues in Europe since the start of the 2012-13 season.

Only Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Graziano Pellè have scored more than Bony’s 56 league goals during that period. Not bad company to be keeping, especially as his goals have come for – with all due respect to Vitesse Arnhem and Swansea City – two of the lesser lights in the Eredivisie and the Premier League. City, with David Silva, Yaya Touré and Samir Nasri servicing the supply line, could be forgiven for thinking the goals will flow even more freely at the Etihad – assuming Bony gets a decent run in the team.

Related: Wilfried Bony signs for Manchester City in £25m deal from Swansea

Bony, to borrow Ruud Gullit’s description on Match of the Day this season, is a goal machine. He has scored 25 in the Premier League since signing from Arnhem for £12m in July 2013 and it says much about his poaching instincts that all but two of those goals have come from inside the penalty area.

Bony is a predator, the sort of centre-forward who comes alive in the box, and his love of scoring has already rubbed off on Jeffrey, his eldest son, who challenged his father at the start of the season to a goal competition and was not willing to accept that any allowance should be made for the fact that one of them is playing in the Premier League and the other for an under-10s team in south Wales. “I said to him: ‘But you’ll score 50 goals because your game and my game is not the same!’” Bony said.

Brought in to compete with, and complement, the talents of Sergio Agüero, Edin Dzeko and Stevan Jovetic, Bony is a rough diamond who offers something a little bit different. The first thing that strikes you when you see the 26-year-old in the flesh is that he is a powerhouse of a man. Once he plants those thighs the size of tree trunks, it takes some doing to get the ball off him.

In an interview with the Guardian in November, Bony admitted there are moments in matches when he likes to show off his strength by playing a little game that involves receiving possession with his back to goal, holding off the centre-half with one arm and running his studs over the top of the ball for as long as he wishes. “Sometimes I do it just for fun,” Bony said. “Just make the defender angry and show him that he can’t do nothing when I’m there.”

Despite not being particularly tall, Bony is excellent in the air – “I have good timing” – and he scored some superb headers in his first season at Swansea, including the winner at Manchester United in the FA Cup. He is not blessed with great pace or dribbling ability and, as a record of only six Premier League assists over 18 months illustrates, laying on chances for others comes a distant second to getting the goals to keep up with Jeffrey. “The creativity, the way to pass the ball to other players to score, is always something I try to do better,” Bony said.

That desire to improve has burned fiercely inside Bony from a young age. He grew up playing street football and, as a young father trying to find his way in life, there were times when he struggled to make ends meet. It was after joining Issia Wazi, a professional club in Ivory Coast, that Bony started to make a name for himself. At the age of 17, Liverpool offered him a trial but Bony looked at the way the ball was being zipped around on the training pitches at Melwood and realised he was “not ready for that level”.

His next foray into Europe, with Sparta Prague, was more successful. Bony was determined to master the language as well as the art of scoring – something that says much about his psyche. “I didn’t think I had to learn Czech but when I put my mind to something I can’t fail. Never,” Bony said.

He took the same view at Swansea, where it is easy to forget that life was not easy initially. Bony gives a chunk of the credit for the turnaround to the personal coach he started working with in December 2013 – a relationship he will almost certainly want to continue at City. “It’s been a big success because there is something I missed before, I was angry before if I didn’t play,” Bony said. “But no sulking, you need to control your emotion and just put your team first. He’s always telling me positive things.”

Everything started to click about 12 months ago. The deluge of goals that made him the Premier League’s highest scorer in 2014 started with two against Manchester City, of all clubs, on New Year’s Day last year, when Swansea lost 3-2 at the Liberty Stadium. Bony played like a man possessed against Manuel Pellegrini’s team. “It was by far the best performance from Bony while he was a Swansea player,” Michael Laudrup, the then Swansea manager, said at the time. “That’s the way we want to see him.”

Laudrup, who departed a month later, never seemed truly convinced by Bony and it is also worth recalling there were reservations on the club’s board about the amount of money spent on the forward. “It’s not what we are about as a club,” Huw Jenkins, the Swansea chairman, told the Observer in November 2013. “Just going out and signing a player that scores 33 goals in Holland, anybody can do that. Just pick the paper up every weekend and there’s your top goalscorer. I think our strength is to find players who are not quite tipping the mark somewhere else … ”

In the end, though, everything has worked out rather nicely for Swansea as well as Bony, who went on to thrive under Garry Monk, Laudrup’s replacement. With interest in the player gathering momentum during the summer, when Bony scored twice in the World Cup finals, Jenkins recognised it would be wise to offer the striker a new contract to enable Swansea to remove a £19m release clause. All the while Bony knew he would get a crack at the big time – he is desperate to play in the Champions League – if he kept on scoring.

The one obvious downside to all of this for Swansea is that, while the club have made a tidy profit on Bony in the space of 18 months, they have lost their talisman. Within the club there is a school of thought it could be wise to keep the money in the bank until the summer and give Bafétimbi Gomis or Nélson Oliveira a crack at leading the line while they scour the market for a replacement. Either way, Bony’s exit leaves a sizeable hole to fill in more than one way.