Debuting superstar striker is upstaged by a teammate and an opponent during defeat to Liverpool in the Community ShieldOK. This might take a while. Just talk among yourselves. For Erling Haaland this was a debut not just to forget, but to shred, incinerate and bury at the bottom of the garden. Haaland looked limb-weary by the end of this clammy high-summer Community Shield final, a curtain-raiser for a stage that has scarcely been cleared of tables and men in brown coats.For much of the second half at the King Power Stadium Haaland skulked and mooched in the centre circle. With seconds left he produced a wonderfully wholehearted miss, clumping his shot off the top of the bar with all the...
There is jeopardy in fresh forward lines and that is where the initial fascination of this season’s Premier League title race liesCan a team be too perfect? Could it be that if you have technically brilliant players in every position who have fully assimilated into a slickly intelligent system, the result is not a remorseless winning machine but a slightly cold entity so fixated on order that when disruption comes it is unable to cope?In the aftermath of last season’s the Champions League exit against Real Madrid, Pep Guardiola dismissed suggestions that his team could not handle adversity, that crisis could send his sophisticated mechanisms haywire. But it is at the very least intriguing that City’s two highest-profile recent signings,...
Signing offers the ruthless unpredictability needed to break better rivals but Manchester City have still taken a riskOnce upon a time, many years ago, there were two warriors named Alf and Roy who fought for rival clans. Alf accused Roy of feigning injury after he had collapsed with ruptured knee ligaments and for the next four years, whenever they met on the battlefield, their fighting was fierce. But then Alf joined the local rivals of Roy’s team. In the derby, Roy hit Alf on the knee, hard, and Alf conceived a terrible revenge.Alf had a young son, less than a year old, and he raised him to be a great warrior. His son had extraordinary physical gifts. He was tall...
Guardiola has signed the one A-list goalscorer who looks an awkward fit but target men have thrived under him beforeOn the face of it this looks like the most basic piece of maths. Here is a move that can never be the wrong move. When life gives you lemons, sign Erling Haaland. When your squad doesn’t have a first-team player whose chief skill is scoring goals, sign Erling Haaland. When six years of careful team-building brings you a Champions League semi-final exit with 31 shots at goal: sign Erling Haaland.To date Haaland’s career has been a kind of extended marketing programme, a showcase for his preternatural ability to do exactly this. Here we have the cheat code player, a bolt-on...