Defenders get used to his methods, analysts find flaws, and he was injured for a major part of the season, but Norwegian has still tallied 31 goals and six assists.
Manchester City’s Erling Haaland reacts during the English Premier League soccer match between Manchester City and Luton Town at Etihad stadium in Manchester, England, Saturday. (AP)
“What does he know about English football?” the pundits sneered when Arsene Wenger assumed reins of Arsenal from Nagoya Grampus, a Japanese League club. Over the next two decades, the Frenchman changed the game in England, both cultural and sporting, and left the shores as a loved visionary. Several managers and players with strange accents and alien surnames would enrich and embellish the game in what is hyped as the most competitive league in the world. Yet, an innate scepticism remains, to scrutinise those from beyond the isles with an extra lens of criticism, to subconsciously find faults and flaws, and to pounce on their slightest slip-ups.
This season, Erling Haaland would have fathomed the merciless scrutiny from former players, failed managers and middle-aged fanboys masquerading as pundits, the meaning of their mic-picking, often reduced to hectoring rivals. The Norwegian, former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher wrote in a column for The Telegraph, is a world-class finisher but not a world-class player yet. “An ultimate luxury player”, reads his first sentence. The piece, in itself, is not a scathing rant on Haaland, but clickbait-ish stuff naturally swallowed the meat of the copy, which focuses on where Haaland needs to improve, and how high-class centre-backs have suffocated him in recent times. His sparring partner in the commentary box, Roy Keane, too entered the ring, remarking that “he is almost like a League Two player”, after his lacklustre performance against Arsenal two game-weeks ago.
