Erling Haaland is already a force of nature – and he’s getting better

“We don’t normally face these kinds of teams,” Erling Haaland reflected on the third of his three goals on Saturday. “Normally teams lose more, but West Ham needed a goal and the line was higher and I had space to go after it.”

The point is that it was Haaland who gave Manchester City that extra option by scoring the two goals that forced West Ham to change their approach in the first place.

The first of these came when he scored after City won the ball back high up the pitch, leaving a big gap as West Ham tried to play out from the back. “With space at the back, he is unstoppable,” said City manager Pep Guardiola. “There is no centre-back, not even with a gun… it is impossible to stop him. He is so quick, so powerful.”

For the second time, City patiently worked their way forward, as they usually have to do, and Haaland fired home convincingly — a half-chance, really — after a series of intricate passes.

The moral of the story is that no matter what you try to do, when Haaland is at his best – and his team-mates can find him – you’re stuck; he added that third goal on the counter-attack after, as he said, West Ham were pushing for an equaliser.

Last weekend, after a varied hat-trick against Ipswich (a penalty, a ball in the back and a shot from outside the box), one of his City team-mates wrote on his match ball that he was fed up with signing them for him. This time, one simply jokingly wrote ‘F*** off’.

Haaland now has 11 hat-tricks to his name for City in just two years with them, with more likely to follow soon.

Haaland lobs past goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski to score his third goal in City’s 3-1 win (Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

“He plays much better,” Guardiola said at the London Stadium, without any hesitation. “In everything.”

Guardiola had been asked whether Haaland’s goals looked a little “crisper” than those he scored last season and on another day he might have been able to point out how many the Norwegian actually scored last season – 38 in 45 appearances in all competitions (he won the Premier League Golden Boot, with 27, as he did in his debut year of 2022-23 when he scored 36) – but this time the City manager was happy to face the truth.

Over the summer, Guardiola left breadcrumbs about some observations, perhaps even some frustrations, about Haaland’s contributions that he didn’t feel the need to share last season. And in the past two weeks, he’s decided to be even more open.

“After the treble (2022-23) he struggled to cope, and maybe not too many holidays,” Guardiola said last weekend. “I remember at the beginning he said: ‘I’m still tired, I’m still a bit exhausted’.”

And after subtly hinting that he wanted more from Haaland during the club’s pre-season tour of the United States, he seized the opportunity to explain exactly what that was. Mostly after Haaland scored that hat-trick against Ipswich.

“We talked a bit in the States. I didn’t like some things and he changed his mind,” Guardiola teased, and when asked later what he didn’t like, he again took the open and honest route.

“I like it when he runs a lot. I like it when he presses like a beast. I like it. It helps to score a goal. When you are connected defensively, you are connected offensively. When you are connected defensively and you run and the ball surprises you, you are not precise.

“This mix; to know exactly what to do and to help us. His body language… imagine a central defender has the ball and he sprints with this body and his legs moving. It’s scary. And it helps us, for the people in the middle and the back to support him, and we are more effective in our high press.

Guardiola congratulates Haaland after his full match at the London Stadium (Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)

“We need him. This is non-negotiable. If you (Haaland) don’t score a goal, that’s fine, but you have to do it (put the pressure). Especially when we work with him, he has to control the ball better, but we are working with him. Hopefully he can do it.”

Beyond the goals, that was all evident on Saturday night. Haaland set up Rico Lewis for what should have been City’s third with a lovely through ball and at one point ran back to stop a West Ham counterattack from a corner.

It was his best all-round performance in what feels like an eternity and if that feels harsh for someone who was still scoring goals last season, it always felt like everything seemed a little bit harder in his second year in English football. With hindsight, it certainly feels that way now.

“There are details,” Guardiola continued after the game. “He stays 20 minutes or half an hour after training to work on finishing, close control, short passes. Last season he wasn’t there even once (to do that job) because he wasn’t feeling well; tired, nagging complaints, most of the season.”

Haaland admitted after scoring in the opening league game against Chelsea two weeks ago that he could “stand there and watch” as his teammates moved the ball up the pitch, and that’s fine because by just being there he can move his defenders into areas where they can’t get near City’s other threats.

Problems can arise when City can’t find him for that one chance, or when they do find him, he misses it anyway, which happened quite a few times last season, especially compared to his first season.

But Guardiola’s message is that City will continue to find him and Haaland looks set to deliver on his end of the bargain.

“What we need is for the team to play better and better to give him more balls in the last third of the pitch. And with Rico, Kevin (De Bruyne), (Ilkay) Gundogan, Bernardo (Silva) and (James) McAtee we are going to create those situations because they are really good in small spaces,” the City manager said.

Haaland has scored seven goals in his three games this season (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

Interestingly, Guardiola has tried to give Haaland relatively simple finishes in another way: crosses to the far post. He had Savinho and Jeremy Doku playing to their strongest sides against Chelsea, with the aim of getting them to the byline to set up the ball for Haaland to cut in, but the players took it upon themselves to switch sides after 15 minutes and it looked better.

In the opening scenes at West Ham, City were clearly looking for those standing crosses too, but when one found its intended target, Haaland headed it over the bar. But even the low crosses were often blocked out.

“In small spaces, which happens quite often against us, we need players with good crosses, but we are still not that clever,” Guardiola continued. “Jeremy, for example, came into the final third and we are not precise enough, as is Jack (Grealish) sometimes, but in small spaces, if we improve in that, he will get more chances and we know how clinical he is. Everyone knows that.”

Yet the incredible statistics that accompanied every one of Haaland’s performances in his debut season suddenly come flooding back.

He scored eight Premier League hat-tricks in 69 games, a feat that Thierry Henry took 258 games to achieve.

Haaland has now scored more than once in 26 per cent of his league games for City – 10 doubles and eight hat-tricks – which is the highest percentage of any player.

He began his Premier League career here at this stadium two years and three weeks ago with a double against West Ham on his league debut, and his hat-trick against Ipswich last weekend extended his scoring record of scoring against every team he has faced in the competition.

Back to where it all started and scoring another hat-trick, it looks like he’s taking it to the next level.

GALLING DEEPER

The briefing: West Ham 1 Manchester City 3 – Another hat-trick from Haaland, but where is Walker?

(Top photo: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)