It’s 4.53pm BST on 13 May 2012. The score at the Etihad Stadium is 2-2 between Manchester City and Queens Park Rangers and the game is into a fourth minute of added time. The Italian international Mario Balotelli has the ball on the edge of the QPR area. Slipping, he pokes a pass beyond two defenders into the box. His team-mate, a £38m recruit from Atlético Madrid the previous summer, manages to read the pass. With one touch, Sergio Agüero eludes a despairing final challenge. With a second, he fires the ball past Paddy Kenny. Flying into the near corner of the net, Agüero’s goal wins the game in the final second. It also means the 20th Premier League title goes to City ahead of Manchester United, on goal difference.
Overlooking the ground from the media gantry was Martin Tyler, the Sky Sports broadcaster. He was commentating on the match and announced the goal to his audience with a howl, crying Agüero’s name and extending the final “O” for a full four seconds, which is a long time in television. “I knew when he took his touch that he was going to score,” Tyler says now. “I’ve been in the job for 38 years and it doesn’t always happen that you anticipate the moment, but he’s such a good player and his touch was so sure, I trusted my instinct. That allowed me just enough time to get air into my lungs.”
Agüero has scored on 121 other occasions during his time in England but that moment is known as the “Agüero goal” and is among the most celebrated in Premier League history. It also serves as an instructive point from which to observe the changes the competition has gone through in its 25 years. Designed in a hurry during the spring of 1992, the Premier League looked very different by the time it arrived at its third decade.
There may have been better goals and there may have been better champions, but there has simply never been a single moment in the other 25 years like this, one that brought the season down to the literal last seconds and had the maximum possible significance: a goal that settled the title itself. No equivocation, no caveats, no time for anything else. Pure spectacle and pure pandemonium.
With one sweeping strike of Aguero’s boot, the past was banished and future set, for a moment that went down in history. As Mike Dean’s final whistle blew, the reality dawned on City as they capped a run of form that has seen them overturn United’s eight-point advantage in the space of five weeks.
The Etihad was a sky-blue explosion of joy and relief in an outpouring of 44 years of frustration as Aguero wheeled his shirt above his head in celebration and Mancini, who cut an increasingly frantic figure as time ran out, raced on to the pitch – accompanied by backroom staff including Brian Kidd and David Platt – in ecstasy.
