Manchester City defy The Erling Haaland Haaland Problem with Premier League win over Chelsea – The Warm-Up

FRIDAY’S BIG STORIES

Big Man Up Top

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.

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.

Well-Timed Bad Luck

Before last night’s game kicked off, Sky Sports asked Graham Potter about Mason Mount’s surprise absence from the line-up. Obviously, we were all hoping for some juicy transgression, but the truth was a little more prosaic. Got a kick in training. Injured. “It never rains but it pours,” said Potter, and the nation’s hearts welled up in sympathy. Well, as much as that’s possible for a manager of Chelsea.

Of course, the problem with reaching for the big cliche before the game is that it leaves you with nowhere to go if things get even worse. Raheem Sterling limps off after five minutes: it never pours but it floods. Christian Pulisic follows him with 22 minutes gone: right, we need to start working on that ark.

But thinking holistically, there are probably some upsides to this extreme weather event. For a start, this probably means that Potter’s job is safe for the moment, if it ever was truly in danger. Which it probably wasn’t. But Chelsea’s squad was a weird, unbalanced thing even before everybody started limping.

For a middle, Chelsea did seem to perk up as the kids came on. Carney Chukwuemeka hit the post and offered a directness that has been missing from Chelsea in recent weeks. Lewis Hall and Omari Hutchinson looked interestingly useful as well. And Conor Gallagher, though not exactly a kid anymore, did a lot of useful running around. That sounds like a veiled insult, but it isn’t meant to be. There’s been quite a lot of useless standing around at Chelsea over the years.

Ultimately, there is never a good time to have an injury crisis. But Chelsea are at the beginning of a project, have exciting prospects on the bench, and have a whole month in which to wave their big chequebook around. No good time, but plenty worse.

Software Reset

Manchester United have got a busy few weeks coming up. FA Cup today, Carabao Cup next Tuesday, then a double-header against first and second in the Premier League. And then, shortly after that, Barcelona. It’s an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation, particularly given that their former No. 7 has been sent on his way.

But Erik ten Hag will not be rushing Jadon Sancho back from his isolated rehabilitation. “Football players aren’t robots. No-one is the same and you need an individual approach. We thought that, in co-operation with Jadon, this was the best choice.” We still don’t know precisely what’s up with Sancho, but the shape of his rehabilitation very much suggests that beyond any physical concerns, it’s his confidence that’s being rebuilt.

It’s been an ill-starred move. Sancho has shown his best only in flickers, and has slipped out of the England reckoning. He’s also been dogged by injuries, both conventional and weird: at one point shortly after his move from Dortmund he was training with cotton wool in his ears, which sounds very serious from a medical point of view, but also a bit like a joke about Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s communication skills. ‘If I hear one more story about Alex Ferguson’s parking space I’m going to scream.’

And so we wait and we see. But while Sancho’s absence is concerning, the suggestion from Ten Hag that he’ll get as long as he needs is probably the best news, even though it’s essentially no news. Another little mark in the Dutchman’s favour, and perhaps another sign that United really have decided to act like a sensible football club again.

IN OTHER NEWS

A more-or-less random drop of old-fashioned FA Cup action, which we include mostly because it relates to something we’ve been wondering. Fashion moves in cycles, right? What comes in goes out; what is out comes back in. Trousers get skinny and then baggy. So are we ever going to see proper short shorts again?

RETRO CORNER

On Sunday, Leeds United are off to Cardiff City in the FA Cup third round. The exact same thing happened two decades ago, except Leeds were then top of the Premiership – now known as the Premier League – while Cardiff were mid-table in the Second Division, which was the third tier at the time. Younger readers will know it as League One. Daft sport.

Anyway, the magic of the cup was strong and heady that evening, and Cardiff came from behind to secure the giant-killing in an atmosphere that veered between intense and unpleasant. Afterwards, there was a massive pitch invasion and Sam Hammam tried to fight David O’Leary in the car park. We’re not expecting anything quite so old-fashioned this time around, although you can never rule anything out. Jesse Marsch does seem moderately feisty at times.

HAT TIP

Duarte remembers going to the pub with then-Brazil captain Socrates, just after the great man made his short, strange cameo for Garforth Town. “It was at that pub, such an unusual setting and so far from his comfort zone, that Socrates made a striking admission: he had never watched back Brazil’s 3-2 defeat by Italy in the 1982 World Cup – none of it. He just couldn’t bear to.”

Obviously, we have no such compunctions. You can see why it weighed so heavily on Socrates soul, though – it’s the archetype of that thing Italy sides do. Nous, efficiency, and sheer bloody-mindedness. “We had a hell of a team and played with happiness,” he told Duarte, years later. “Then Rossi had three touches and scored a hat-trick. Football as we know it died on that day.”

COMING UP

Everton begin the weekend’s cup festivities with a trip to Manchester United. If they get anything out of their hosts, then it won’t technically count as a giant-killing, but everybody will be very surprised. And nobody more so than Frank Lampard.

Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll be back on Monday.