I watched the footie last night: Manchester City v R B Leipzig in the Champions League. Erling Haaland doesn’t do much, over the course of a game, but what he does do he does supremely well. He seems entirely unaffected by the doubts and uncertainties which make other strikers scuff the shot, head the ball wide or lob it tamely into the arms of the goalkeeper. There is nothing half-hearted about the way he plays. Plan A is to put the ball in the back of the net as quickly as possible, and there is no plan B. He has an accelerator, but no brake.
Haaland looks like a cyborg – part-man, part-machine – who’s come back from the future to teach us how to play football. Having scored five goals, he held out his hand to the crowd so they could count the fingers (and thumb). After 62 minutes, Pep Guardiola decided that, like a punch-drunk boxer, R B Leipzig had taken enough punishment, and took Haaland off. When asked what his “super-power” was, during a pitch-side interview after the game, Haaland said, without any obvious irony, “scoring goals”…
No comments:
Post a Comment