As the drama drew to a close, Erling Haaland wasn’t where he wanted to be. Manchester City’s number nine, regular penalty taker and Golden Boot winner, was off the pitch, unable to change anything as his evening turned into a personal ordeal.
He stood mostly just behind the line of City substitutes, coaches and staff who had gathered, arm in arm, along the pitch to watch the penalty shootout against Real Madrid.
Every so often, Haaland would step forward to join the line, jumping up and down, shouting words of encouragement. But then he would walk away again, displaying all the symptoms of a footballer who resented the mix of stress and helplessness: head down, pacing anxiously, hands stuffed in his top pockets tracksuit.
These are the nights, after all, when the elite players, the true stars – of which Haaland is certainly one – like to remind us why, at the highest level, they usually flourish. When the heat of battle becomes dangerously close to intolerable, it’s these players who more often than not come into their own.
Just look at Jude Bellingham’s contribution in setting up Rodrygo’s opening goal and a touch from the sky to knock the ball down and set up the decisive attack. Bellingham continued the momentum by scoring Real Madrid’s second penalty with the expertise he displayed all night, as if he were perplexed that anyone could be so impudent as to suspect that a player with his gifts would even consider to let City get away with it.
Haaland, on the other hand, had just 21 touches of the ball before being substituted after 90 minutes. He completed five passes, which seems almost implausible given the volume of pressure City exerted. In total, City completed 846 passes, but none came from Haaland until the 37th minute.
He had five shots, but only one on target, and there was a header in the first half that bounced off the crossbar. It would therefore not be true to say that Haaland never threatened Madrid’s goal. But Pep Guardiola was kind when he said City had “played exceptionally well in all departments”. They failed in the penalty area and, to be fair to Guardiola, he acknowledged that point in his post-match analysis.
Across the two matches, Haaland had two shots on target and lost possession more times, 14, than the number of times, 11, when he found a teammate with the ball. It was rare to see him this ineffective and City fans could be forgiven for expecting better when, for the most part, they are used to a different version of Haaland.
When the final whistle blew, it meant Haaland was reduced to the role of chief supporter. The first player he approached was Bernardo Silva, kissing the Portuguese on the side of the head and offering whatever words of consolation he could muster to one of the two City players whose penalties were saved.
Haaland headed straight for sophomore Mateo Kovacic, then returned to Bernardo to chaperone him off the field, an arm around his shoulder. When a television crew got too close, Haaland pushed the camera away to spare his teammate from the intrusion.
Guardiola later explained that Haaland had asked to “come out” of the game, meaning the striker felt like he had nothing in the tank for extra time. The same, according to the City manager, applied to Kevin de Bruyne, who was substituted in the 112th minute, meaning City went into a penalty shootout without the two players who would have was their safest bet to beat Andriy Lunin, the Madrid goalkeeper.
Haaland has scored 42 of his 47 career penalties, De Bruyne has nine of 11. None of us will ever know if their presence could have changed anything, but it’s tempting to think it could have. Kovacic, for his part, could have been removed from City’s list of five penalty takers.
Unfortunately for City, both players in question have had injury problems this season and, from a fitness perspective, this may have caught up with them at the wrong time.
If that is the case, one might perhaps wonder why Guardiola started with both in the 5-1 win over Luton Town between the two legs of this quarter-final. Could they have rested against the 18th team in the Premier League? You have to conclude that yes, they probably could.
Either way, something was wrong with Haaland, although the fact remains that it’s difficult to be too critical of a striker who has avidly racked up 83 goals and counting. of his first two seasons in the colors of City.
Haaland, we are constantly told, is not having such a good season and that may be true, to an extent, in the context of his record-breaking first year in Manchester. But then you look at his scoring patterns and it reminds you that he has 31 goals this season.
At the same time, there is no doubt that he is going through a difficult and difficult time and, on his current form, it is not easy to locate the precious magic that helped him annihilate so many defenses last season.
Roy Keane went too far, as often happens, when he recently described Haaland as looking like a Ligue 2 player. A more accurate assessment is that Haaland is a great goalscorer – one of the greatest, obviously – but not always a great footballer in terms of other aspects of his game. There are imperfections. Yes, the good clearly outweighs the bad, but he doesn’t want these peripheral performances to be a recurring theme, especially on occasions that capture the attention of the entire football world.
Further analysis shows that he hasn’t scored in four games against Madrid. He never got the better of Antonio Rudiger in particular and, on a wider level, Haaland didn’t score in the semi-final or final for the Treble winners. Not yet anyway.
This may sound like nitpicking, but surely great players are supposed to shape great games. It was the biggest of all for City this season and the best part of Haaland’s evening came before kick-off when he was awarded his golden boot for finishing top scorer in the competition Last year.
Luis Figo handed it over, Haaland smiled for the cameras, and then the trophy was moved to safety. For a player of Haaland’s exploits, it will have seemed like a consolation prize at the end of the night, watching from the edges, devoid of any real influence and perhaps no longer seeming so superhuman.
(Header photo by Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)