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,...
Reference to Hillsborough in pre-match intelligence points to negligence of French police in dealing with Liverpool fansThe truly shocking revelation about the disastrous approach of the French police at the Champions League final in Paris appeared in plain sight in the first, flawed official report into the near-disaster released last Friday. Perhaps unwittingly from the report’s author, Michel Cadot, an official working in France’s sports ministry, it illuminated most clearly so far why European football’s showpiece evening descended into brutality and chaos.The single sentence about police “intelligence” before the match has provided the first glimpse of an explanation as to why the officers were so tooled-up, and acted like self-appointed last-ditch defenders of civilisation rather than guardians of safety for...
Striker plays with everything he has, spiritually and physically, and has so far taken a rapid ascent in his considerable strideIf you think the pressure of a transfer to one of the world’s elite clubs – at an eventual cost potentially reaching the €100m mark – might weigh on Darwin Núñez, then you have a lot to learn about Liverpool’s new centre-forward. The Uruguayan was always ready for this. His whole – and relatively brief, to date – career in Europe has been an unequivocal line of pressure and expectation, from when the newly flush Spanish second-tier side Almería signed him for a fee north of €5.5m shortly after his 20th birthday, in 2019.That initial leap over from his first...
Striker will shortly leave the club after a memorable eight-year spell there that is also a source of pride in his native BelgiumA little while after Liverpool had lifted the Premier League trophy at a near-empty but electrified Anfield in July 2020, ending that 30-year wait for the title, something caught the attention of observers inside the ground. All players and staff had departed down the tunnel before one suddenly reappeared: Divock Origi. He walked towards the centre circle and, amid the ticker tape, put his arms behind his back and fixed his gaze on the Kop. It was a curious sight but also, it felt, a telling one – this was the Belgian’s way of saying goodbye.If it was...