Erling Haaland has offered a pretty clear rallying cry to Manchester City – they must hunt down Arsenal at the top of the Premier League.
Haaland spoke to Amazon Prime Video after Manchester City beat Leeds United 3-1 on Wednesday night.
Haaland had scored twice in City’s win, taking his Premier League goal tally for the season to 20 in just 14 games.
The Norwegian wasn’t celebrating that too heavily hough as he instead kept focused on the Premier League title race.
Haaland brought up Arsenal sitting top of the table and offered five words that may seem a little menacing.
“We have to hunt them,” said Haaland, placing laser focus on the Gunners at the top of the Premier League table.
City’s win cuts the gap at the top of the table back to five points and puts Pep Guardiola’s men back above Newcastle United.
Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images
ARSENAL V MANCHESTER CITY LOOMING AMID HAALAND COMMENTS
Arsenal have some big games coming up with 2023 now on the horizon.
Newcastle at home, Tottenham Hotspur away and Manchester United at home are all coming up very soon and before you know it, the game against City will arrive.
Wednesday February 15th sees City make the trip down to the Emirates Stadium.
The narratives are plain and clear.
Mikel Arteta against his mentor Pep Guardiola, Oleskandr Zinchenko facing his former club and Gabriel Jesus attempting to return from injury in time to play.
That game could be enormous for this title race and Haaland would no doubt love to add Arsenal to the list of clubs he has dominated this season.
City need to just focus on winning in order to cut the gap to Arsenal and hopefully pile the pressure on the Gunners ahead of that February meeting.
‘CONFIDENCE’: JOURNALIST SAYS ARSENAL BELIEVE THEY’LL GET ACE WHO’S ‘SO DESPERATE’ TO SIGN
Speaking on the Ranks FC Podcast, Dean Jones has been discussing Arsenal and their pursuit of Mykhaylo Mudryk.
The Ukrainian winger was the subject of a bid from the Gunners this week as the north London club had a £55m offer for the attacker knocked back by Shakhtar Donetsk.
Jones has kept abreast of this situation throughout, and he says that despite being knocked back, Arsenal do feel confident about making this move happen, stating that the Gunners are prepared to pay over £70m for this player.
Photo by PressFocus/MB Media/Getty Images
ARSENAL CONFIDENT
Jones shared what he knows about Mudryk and Arsenal.
“You have to understand how Shakhtar are looking at this. Look at the recent market and two recent deals for players who are playing similar roles in big teams and you see Darwin Nunez for £85m and Antony for £85m to Liverpool and Manchester United,” Jones said.
“Shakhtar are going to see that as the marker, £85m is the marker for a player of that significance to your team. I don’t know if Arsenal will go that high. I don’t think they have any expectation to go into the 80s here. They had an expectation to get into the 70s for sure, but this is the big conundrum for Arsenal, will they get this player for any cost or will they limit it? I think they’ll limit it personally.
“There is a confidence in the club that they’ll get the player, just look at himself, he’s desperate to get there, he’s posting on social media, he’s so desperate to get there.”
DON’T OVERPAY
Arsenal may be determined to get Mudryk, but they can’t fall into the trap of overpaying for the winger.
Shelling out over £70m for a player who has never kicked a ball in one of Europe’s top five leagues is a risk to say the least, and on top of that, he’s barely even played for Shakhtar, failing to make more than 20 appearances in a season before this campaign.
Arsenal need to tread carefully here.
SOURCE: hitc.com