Striking Viking: Unstoppable Haaland holds key to Man City’s trophy quest
The Norwegian striker has already netted an astonishing seven goals in the first three league games
THE new English Premier League (EPL) season is only three games old, and already Erling Haaland is felling records with each passing week.
The 24-year-old Manchester City striker has struck the back of the net an amazing seven times in the first fortnight of the 2024/25 campaign – the most goals scored by a single player in the opening three fixtures across Europe’s top five leagues in nearly a quarter of a century.
Haaland’s remarkable tally – one against Chelsea, and back-to-back hat-tricks against Ipswich Town and West Ham United – puts him well on track for the Golden Boot award. That was his eighth hat-trick in a Manchester City jersey since he signed for them two years ago, and having played just 69 games for the Blues to date, that means he is scoring a treble an average of once every nine matches.
In his debut EPL season, Haaland – who arrived from German side Borussia Dortmund in 2022 for what now appears to be a bargain £51 million (S$87.1 million) transfer fee – wasted no time in rewriting the record books as he scored 36 times, the most by a player in a single campaign.
That superhuman feat helped the Citizens land the coveted treble of the league title, the FA Cup and the Champions League, an achievement that their neighbours Manchester United achieved back in 1999.
Refreshed and raring to go
While many of his teammates were with their national teams in Germany and the United States taking part in the European Championship and the Copa America tournaments respectively, Haaland was getting a rare summer off without kicking a ball.
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Norway failed to qualify for Euro 2024 and that meant that Haaland was able to recharge his batteries. In all, he enjoyed an extended break of nearly six weeks – a luxury by many professional footballers’ standards. He spent time with family and friends in the southern Spanish city Marbella, Saint-Tropez in France, the island of Capri off the coast of Naples, and at his hometown of Bryne in Norway.
He returned to Manchester happy, refreshed and raring to go. He may have already racked up seven goals this term, but he was scoring freely in pre-season too with five strikes in four matches.
Haaland is what one may call the complete striker. He stands at a towering 1.94 metres, is able to score with either foot, heads the ball well, takes free kicks and penalties, and is just an absolute menace inside the box. Put simply, he is every defender’s worst nightmare. He is blessed with strength, speed, agility, good positioning and intelligence.
Former Manchester City defender Richard Dunne summed it up perfectly when, in a report by football website Goal.com, he described Haaland as a footballing “genius”.
“Sometimes you have got to stand back and just admire genius footballers and accept that if he wants to, he is going to do things because of the way that he moves, the desire that he has got to score goals, the positions that he gets himself into. He’s so difficult to contain,” said Dunne, who played nearly 300 times for the club from 2000 to 2009.
He added: “You are, unfortunately, in a position where you’re playing the best team in the world, with the best centre forward in the world, who is desperate to score goals. It’s almost mission impossible in terms of trying to stop him on a regular basis.”
AWOL in the big games
If there’s one criticism of Haaland, however, it is perhaps the fact that he has often come up short when it matters.
When Manchester City crashed out of the Champions League at the quarter-final stage last season, a lot of the blame went to Haaland as he failed to score in both games against Real Madrid. He barely left a mark, aside from a header that hit the crossbar in the second leg.
And when he faced Manchester United in the FA Cup final at Wembley, Haaland was again denied by the woodwork but he did not manage to do much else as the Red Devils overcame the odds to win the trophy.
Haaland will argue that he has produced the goods on a fairly consistent basis, at least in the EPL. He scored seven times in 12 games against Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham, Manchester United and Chelsea in his debut season, and eight times against those same teams last season.
Those numbers aside, what is clear is that Haaland, at just 24, is far from his peak. He will continue to torment defenders and score goals by the bucketload because that is what he loves doing.
If he maintains his form and delivers trophies for his club, it will not be too long before he eventually wins the coveted Ballon d’Or award – an honour given to the player deemed to have performed the best over the previous season.
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