While most megastar footballers decide to star in the latest Nike or Adidas viral video, or to line up a fashion shoot with Gucci, Erling Haaland had a different idea of what he wanted to endorse with his vast fame. Haaland wanted to be in a video game.
It came relatively out of the blue when the Manchester City striker announced a few weeks ago he was to be the new Barbarian King in the massively popular mobile game Clash of Clans. At its essence, the aim of the game, downloaded billions of time — including by Haaland — is to build a village and train an army capable of crushing rival villages.
It’s a bit like the approach Haaland takes to opposition football teams: flatten them if possible, if not at least maim them enough so they don’t come back for more.
And the 23-year-old is not merely appearing in adverts promoting the game — he is actually in it, joining the giants and warriors, the wizards and archers and dragons, an array of characters all with different strengths and weaknesses.
Haaland’s are pretty simple. He places a ball down and boots it at a defensive target, usually destroying it in one go. Then he kind of runs around, often aimlessly, booting stuff. Again, it’s quite fitting of the striker. Absolutely deadly with a shot, but not necessarily offering much elsewhere.
It is what particularly irks critics on the rare occasions that City don’t win, or don’t play as convincingly as they usually do.
After City were knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid, it was Haaland’s fault. In the goalless draw with Arsenal in March, after a glaring miss commentator Gary Neville joked it was like he had “never played football before”.
In what is increasingly looking like one of the most ludicrous comments in punditry history, Roy Keane was even more brutal post-match. “The levels of his general play is so poor,” Keane said.
“Not just today, I think his laying stuff off, headers, whatever it might be – in front of goal he’s the best in the world – but for his general play for such a player it is so poor.
“He’s almost like a League Two player, that’s the way I look at him. His general play has to improve.”
Does it? Do we really need to tinker with a striker who, if trajectories continue, is destined to go down as one of — if not the — greatest ever? Do we need to mess with whatever rare chemistry combines in his head when he is on a football pitch?
Since Keane decided to compare Haaland, one of the greatest young footballers in the world, to a League Two player, he has not started dropping deeper, demanding more of the ball, drifting into spaces out wide, but he has also not stopped scoring.
Nine goals in eight games, including two to down Tottenham in what was a potentially sticky fixture standing between City and the Premier League title.
Haaland did very little else again with the ball. Twenty-four touches, so few and spread out that his touch map looked like it had gathered dust in a cupboard for a few months. Fifteen passes — 13 that found their target. He won the ball in the air twice.
But two shots, two goals. One run so perfectly timed that Kevin De Bruyne played the ball into his path without even looking for Haaland to tap in from a yard out. A stoppage-time penalty converted with trademark certainty.
None of the rest really matters when you possess the most lethal finish in football and an unrivalled understanding of space and time in and around the opposition penalty area.
Goal-scoring is the rarest commodity in football, the elusive elixir that everybody craves, and Haaland has found a way to plunder it. There will be hundreds of passes each game, scores of tackles, headers, set pieces, dribbles, crosses. There will usually be only one or two goals that decide things — that separate the winners from the losers. And more often than not, Haaland will score them.
In the league this season he has passed the ball 3,143 fewer times than Rodri. But it will be his Golden Boot that is remembered — not the fact Rodri passed the ball a lot.
An astonishing 36 Premier League goals last season — a tally so outrageous it would seem more likely to happen only in a video game — and 27 this season, with one game to play.
In only two Premier League seasons Haaland has already scored more Premier League goals than Gianfranco Zola, Gareth Bale and Bruno Fernandes. He has scored more Premier League goals than Luton Town have in their history. Last season, he outscored two teams — Wolves and Everton.
If he was to score in the Premier League at the same rate for the next 10 seasons, by which time he would still only be 33, the same age as Kyle Walker currently showing no signs of aging, he would have 318 goals — smashing Alan Shearer’s record of 260.
There are, of course, many factors standing in the way of that. Not least that he will more than likely end up at Real Madrid, somewhere along the way. For now, though, we should cherish Haaland while he is here, marvel at his ability to do little else but score. Before he is off to other clans, to vanquish other villages.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/eBNItkr
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