‘He’s my weakness’: How Silva became the player of Guardiola’s dreams

Bernardo Silva could see that the debutant was struggling so took matters into his own hands.

Abdukodir Khusanov was drowning in the early moments of his first game, a home fixture against Chelsea; hardly surprising given the Uzbek – who at that point spoke no English – had just the one training session with Manchester City. Silva recognised this and spent at least 10 minutes of that eventual 3-1 victory effectively stood alongside Khusanov, coaching him through a torturous start to life in England. Simple passes, doubling up, just being there.

In time, the central defender will likely reflect on that act of leadership as a reason he brushed off early nerves to become the player City scouts had identified while at Lens. It is also no coincidence that Silva was personally handed the captain’s armband by Pep Guardiola four months later.

Guardiola ripped up the rulebook with that decision, scrapping the usual election held for squad and staff to pick their leader. During a season of strife, City’s manager had seen Silva as an example – always fit, never late, not somebody to cry off. Guardiola says that the harsher the predicament, the more that the little Portuguese shows his enduring worth.

More than anything else, that is what City will need to somehow replace over the summer. The truth is, they cannot and will need to find different ways of producing what he has done for nine years.

It’s been known that this was to be Silva’s final campaign in Manchester for almost a year but the way Pep Lijnders accidentally dropped the semi-official announcement in a press conference last week – remarks met with open mouths – suddenly made the goodbye real.

Silva has taken on the captaincy with vigour and pride, using what he learned from Fernandinho and Vincent Kompany in his early days at the club, having studied how they approached the daily rigours and became the standard-bearers for excellence. And his own example is now one to follow for the raft of young talents in the building. He had to fight to become a club icon, David Silva once checking if he was OK mentally during a tricky first year.

Now 31, he will leave as somebody deserving of a lasting tribute around the campus. Somebody who completed only nine full Premier League games in his first season and had to remain patient, eventually nominated for PFA Player of the Year in 2019 – which was won by Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk, much to Guardiola’s disapproval and something the manager still references now.

A winning mentality, a player better as the stakes became larger. ‘There are players born to play on the big stages, the life or death, and Bernie is one of them,’ Guardiola has said. ‘Bernie is my weakness. My favourite one.

‘If you think that the team comes first… sometimes the politician says something like that – the country comes first, but then after it never comes first – but with Bernardo it is.’

Nobody has ever featured in more games under Guardiola than Silva – and the statistics are not even close. Sunday at Chelsea will be his 451st appearance in sky blue, Kevin De Bruyne next but 70 shy (the Belgian played 41 games for City before Guardiola joined). Silva is one behind Mike Summerbee in eighth place among the club’s all-time list.

Silva has revealed recently that, such is his affection for City, if they were stationed in the south of Europe, somebody would need to drag him out of the place kicking and screaming. He wanted to leave in at least two summers, especially down while living alone in a city-centre flat during Covid, but no suitors – including Paris Saint-Germain and to a lesser extent, Barcelona – would stump up the £70million valuation.

Silva understood City’s refusal to just give him away and now leans into the idea that fate worked perfectly for him, aware that he would have turned a back on the Treble and four titles in a row.

After one intense summer of interest, and discussions with the club about potentially leaving, Silva turned in one of his truly great displays at Stamford Bridge. Operating as a No 6 with Rodri for the very first time, against a Thomas Tuchel team that had beaten them in the Champions League final four months earlier, Silva bossed the game.

A spellbinding afternoon from a player who is not as physically strong as others, nor as quick in the hustle and bustle of a division that relies so heavily on those attributes. It is a position we should see him in on Sunday and he makes City tick deeper as they build from the back.

He had learned in the early years that the ball remained in play far longer here than in Portugal and France, that rough tackles would not always amount to free-kicks. He observed this himself and would devour these aspects of English football.

That 1-0 win at Chelsea, on their way to the second of those four titles in a row, has the name of Gabriel Jesus on the scoresheet but was manufactured by Silva – a key component in the home team failing to register a shot on target for the first time in 18 years. His shirt sopped.

‘One of my dreams as a manager is that every player, except the goalkeeper, can play every position,’ Guardiola said. ‘That means you understand the game, you have physicality to adapt to many positions and the intelligence to do it.

‘The biggest detail with Bernie is he is so intelligent, so smart reading what is going on. Not all of them have this ability.’ In a nutshell, that is Bernardo Silva.