Manchester City defy The Erling Haaland Haaland Problem

There is a sensation particular to watching Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City. Most of the time they’re thrilling and brilliant, but every now and then something seems to stutter, and a vast cloud of nothingness balloons over the pitch. 98% of the time his teams destroy the opposition. 2% of the time they smother themselves.So it was in the first half against Chelsea last night, and perhaps there was a compliment buried in their somewhere. Guardiola was taking this game so seriously that he’d mistaken it for a Champions League knockout game and sent half his team out to play in the wrong positions.But where no football was happening, that’s where the mind starts to wander, and your super soaraway Warm-Up spent the first half thinking about The Erling Haaland Problem.

Is it even a real problem? Has Guardiola fatally unbalanced his title machine by getting in a man who scores goals – lots and lots of goals – but doesn’t do anything else and also somehow stops everybody else scoring?It’s a really tempting idea, made more so by the fact that Haaland didn’t even touch the ball for the first half of the first half. At heart it’s almost a fable: the man who had everything he ever needed reaching for something more, and losing everything. Certainly, as half-time approached and an improvised, patched-up Chelsea started to look like the more coherent side, we were about ready to call it.

However, we then got a demonstration of the big advantage that City have over Arsenal, and over everybody else in the division as well: depth. Riyad Mahrez and Jack Grealish came off the bench after an hour and combined for the game’s only goal four minutes later. That stood in sharp contrast to Arsenal’s options when chasing the game against Newcastle, when they were able to bring on a slightly taller right-back.

Haaland wasn’t involved at all in the goal, at least not directly; but as City worked the ball from the right to the left, then into the box and back across, he was dragging both central defenders around with him, and then he was open in the middle for the cut back as Grealish sent the ball across the six-yard box. That is to say, he doesn’t need to touch the ball to occupy the opposition.

And more than anything he did on the pitch, it was something Grealish said afterwards that persuaded us that The Haaland Problem isn’t quite the mythic story of self-destruction we were hoping for. Chatting away to Sky Sports, he cheerfully acknowledged that he was still working out how to be a City player. “It’s been so much more difficult than I thought. I’ve been here 18 months and I’m still getting used to it.”

Everything takes time. Even the best working out how to play with the best. We’ll loop back to The Haaland Problem if City don’t win anything for a couple of seasons. And we’re pretty confident that we won’t have to bother.

Source: eurosport.co.uk