Not for the first time, Kevin De Bruyne read the situation to perfection. Not for the first time, he spotted the right play just a little earlier than everyone else. And of course this was always his gift: not simply to pick the right option but to do it faster than anyone else, buying him those crucial fractions of a second when everything else was in flux and only he in stillness.
And of course this was not the only respect in which De Bruyne understood the game of football better than most. As a struggling teenager in the Genk academy, he noticed the way the club abruptly stopped paying for a foster family to house him, and then quietly resumed when he started banging in goals for the second team. Cast adrift at Chelsea, he noticed how he was ignored while first-team players were lavished with attention and bespoke coaching.
