Red Bull Salzburg 0 Manchester City 2: Silva starts to repay the faith with City's Euro opener

Europa League

Manchester City defender Vincent Kompany hailed the quality of David Silva after Manchester City's win over Red Bull Salzburg last night.

Silva – a 24m summer signing from Valencia – opened the scoring in the 2-0 Europa League victory in Austria.

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Silva has endured a stop-start first few weeks since his arrival from Valencia and has even been linked with a swift move back to Spain. But the World Cup star provided City with their early lead before Jo, who staggeringly was the longest-serving outfield player in the City starting line-up despite spending the past 18 months away on loan, drilled home the second from an acute angle.

It was a fully merited triumph for a team that at times showed the form that brought them that encouraging early-season triumph over Liverpool, and gave Roberto Mancini an indication that after recent Premier League setbacks against Sunderland and Blackburn, his highly expensive team are moving in the right direction.

When Silva's capture was announced right in the middle of the World Cup, it created a ripple of excitement to match any at City throughout another breathless summer.

Although not in the class of his Barcelona-bound former Valencia colleague David Villa, Silva had been attracting admiring glances across Europe.

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That City should be able to attract such a player, at a time when the general trend has been for big names to decamp to La Liga, emphasised both their financial muscle and the new eyes with which the Eastlands outfit are now being viewed.

As it turned out, Silva still had 11 days of what, for him, was a largely inactive World Cup to go, the consequent celebrations and late return for pre-season training playing havoc with the settling-in process. That the two recent international breaks have taken Spain to Mexico and Argentina have hardly helped either, so suddenly, Silva was a man with something to prove.

The assured manner with which he took the seventh-minute opportunity presented to him by Jo did not appear that of a man wracked by self-doubt.

And Kompany said: "He is an amazing player – and like every foreign player he needs time to settle in the Premier League.

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"We've seen in training he's an amazing player – he'll be very important for us at times this season.

"We definitely look like a unit already but some stuff is down to luck. I think in three or four months we will be even stronger."

Juventus, City's opponents at Eastlands in their next match, drew 3-3 with Group A's other team – Lech Poznan – last night.

And Kompany added: "It's a great result, knowing we have a home game next time...it could be very important."