Sergio Agüero has been far more than a great goalscorer for Manchester City | Jonathan Wilson

Striker’s numbers are astonishing and QPR goal is legendary but he has also done more than anyone to change club’s image

Sergio Agüero has scored 181 league goals for Manchester City, but one of them would have been sufficient to make him a legend. Whatever else Agüero had done in his career, his strike on the final day of the 2011-12 season, running on to receive Mario Balotelli’s only assist of that campaign before, with glorious inevitability, lashing his shot past Paddy Kenny, would have written his name in golden letters in the history of the club. There was, though, quite a lot else besides.

But let’s begin with that injury-time strike at the end of his first season at the Etihad, a goal that consecrated a new era of English football. Praise the awareness, praise the movement, praise his earlier instruction to Balotelli, praise the shot, but most of all praise the calmness in that moment, when a season came down to a single kick, he never looked like doubting himself. And this for City, a club that had come to be defined by doubt, a club that had become a byword for failure, a club for whom if it could go wrong, it usually did. That game against QPR stands now as the last battle between the old City and the new.

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Related: Sergio Agüero pays tribute to fans after confirming Manchester City exit

The other 13 players who featured against QPR in May 2012

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