Agreed with this. His all round game has definitely dropped a level or two over the past couple of injury blighted seasons. Still good for 20-30 goals a season, though - injuries allowing.
I feel similarly about Aguero really. It's hard to come at this kind of subject and not sound like a mad man because he's obviously elite level (and I think he's always been a better all-round player than Kane), but I think he could have easily been a 40-50 goal per season player had he not been injured every other month between 2012 and 2015. There's a particular passage of play from 2014, funnily enough from a game against Spurs at White Hart Lane, that I always remember, where he skips past three defenders in a flash and smacks it off the post from a tight angle. It's the first clip in this video.
He went off before half-time in that game with yet another injury. Then a few weeks after coming back he picked up another hamstring injury in a game against Everton. It meant he wasn't properly fit for the World Cup. His injury record might well have stopped him (and Messi) from winning the tournament, considering they lost so narrowly to Germany in the final. It was a game Aguero couldn't even start because his fitness was a huge question mark, which meant that Higuain started ahead of him. Hey, maybe if Aguero had started that game
this miss never would have happened.
Aguero's last hamstring injury was four years ago, so he's well beyond those chronic problems now, but I think it cost him a yard of pace that he's never quite managed to get back. Had Guardiola not come in and turned him into one of the best all-round forwards in the game, I'm not sure where his career would have gone or how quickly he would have tailed off. It's something we City fans like to forget but when Lampard left for New York in 2015 he dished a lot of dirt on Aguero that made me really question his attitude to the game: “Sergio picked up a fair few [fines]. He just didn’t care. He was so laid back and would just stroll out to the training pitch like five minutes late.”
When Pep came in and we signed Jesus, there was a lot of premature talk that Aguero was on his way out but it wasn't completely without evidence. His goalscoring record was still excellent but his overall play took a few months to get back to normal. Even after a few months under Pep, Aguero was struggling against Championship defenders in cup games. I remember us beating Huddersfield 5-1 in the FA Cup, and though he had a good game (scoring twice) there were times where their centre-halves beat him for pace. Sergio Aguero, struggling against second tier defenders - something didn't add up.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he received his only red card during that 16/17 season. He cut a very frustrated figure for most of the campaign and went through tough patches where he couldn't find the net.
Sadly I think the period of his career where he would have kicked on to become a Ronaldo-level robotic goal machine was lost to repeated hamstring injuries that slowed him down and a managerial regime that didn't seem to give a stuff about sports science and player fitness. By the time Sergio should have been hitting his peak (2014-2017) he was instead getting to grips with a new diet that stopped him from having such bad muscular issues -
no red meat, low carbs - and struggling with a knee injury that he later had surgery on. Since that knee surgery in April 2018 he's shown signs of being the sort of striker who would have been capable of scoring 40+ goals a season when he was in his mid-20s.
He's consistently registered 30-goal seasons since Guardiola's arrival, he's obviously absolutely excellent, and he's deservedly leading the way for the Golden Boot right now, but he's technically at the point in his career where players usually enter a decline. What I'm trying to say is that him finally being free of injury now has allowed him to join up with his original trajectory, but sadly at the point where the line goes down. 2013/14 should have been the point where he really kicked on but he only made 30 starts in all competitions. In those 30 starts he scored 28 goals. Last season he made 41 starts - back in 13/14 that number of starts would have seen him register 35-38 goals.
So while he's excellent, and while he'll leave this country as a City and Premier League legend, I think he could have been a football god on the levels of Maradona, Messi, Pele, Ronaldo, etc. And I'm wondering whether Kane's legacy will be similar in the future - he'll be remembered as a great striker, but not the godlike figure it seemed like he could be before injuries got on top of him and stopped him from reaching his maximum potential.