Man City 6-0 Nottingham Forest (Haaland 12′, 23′, 38′, Cancelo 50′, Alvarez 65′, 87′)
ETIHAD STADIUM — I think it’s probably going to work out OK, on balance. You can fret about your Bundesliga tax. You can worry about how Manchester City will reinvent their attack to accommodate him. You can make the point that he picked up a few injuries last season. But these are all small speed bumps intended to stop an armoured tank. Erling Haaland is not a man who seems to be consumed by self-doubt. Or anything other than the relentless pursuit of goals, quite frankly.
How do we love thee? Let us count the ways (but fear not if you forget anything for there will be countless other chances to wax lyrical). Haaland is a physical freak, a striker who isn’t just able to win battles against those tasked to stop him but to bully them into submission. And when he has done that, forced those defenders to back off a little after the bruising, he delights in the space he has been afforded.
The statistics are silly already, but may well go stratospheric. Haaland has nine goals in his first five Premier League matches and was taken off before the 80th minute in two of them. We knew that he had little problem with barely touching the ball but coming alive when it did come his way; the Bundesliga taught us that. But the efficiency of his forward play is astounding to witness in person. It does some disservice to the quality of service, but he really is a ball magnet.
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Conte calls on English football to scrap VAR after Kane penalty decision in West Ham draw31 August, 2022Not that Haaland was bought to beat promoted teams at home. He is the intended final piece of the Champions League jigsaw, the football robot designed to be the difference-maker to whichever super club is lucky enough to make him theirs. But that only makes evenings like these more impressive, when Pep Guardiola adjusts a few of the wires, checks the oil levels and road tests his Striker 3000 against a poor, defenceless beast. Haaland scored a second hat-trick in five days before being brought off for a rest.
Player ratings
Man City
- Ederson 6
- Walker 7
- Dias 7
- Stones 7
- Cancelo 8
- Rodri 7
- Gundogan 7
- Silva 8
- Foden 7
- Alvarez 8
- Haaland 9
Subs
- De Bruyne 7
- Mahrez 6
- Palmer 6
- Gomez 6
- Lewis 6
Nottingham Forest
- Henderson 6
- Worrall 5
- Williams 6
- Kouyate 5
- McKenna 5
- Lodi 5
- Yates 6
- O’Brien 6
- Freuler 5
- Gibbs-White 5
- Johnson 5
Subs
- Biancone 6
- Colback 6
- Awoniyi 6
- Toffolo 6
- Dennis 5
These are not the evenings on which Nottingham Forest’s Premier League future will be decided. They will leave chastened, a little embarrassed by the gap to the best, but they should not be surprised nor disheartened. They cannot afford to be; Forest play Bournemouth, Leeds and Fulham in September, either side of an international break during which Steve Cooper can have a mini second preseason.
That does not mean that they are easy. Forest seemed to put so much effort into chasing the ball – often with little success – that they looked out of puff when they got it. Passes went astray, defenders were flustered and Brennan Johnson and Morgan Gibbs-White, nominally a front two, ran this way and that, that way and this, but barely saw the ball. I hope those in the away end enjoyed themselves before and after the game, because the middle wasn’t much fun.
But then that is the lot of the promoted club, no matter how much money you have spent and no matter how highly-rated your manager may be. They arrived to put up a fight and they walked into a whirlwind. They asked a group of high-end Championship central defenders to deal with a freak who may well become the blueprint by which the next football megastar is judged. If it’s any consolation, he might well do it to every team in this league.
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